ABSTRACT
Governing parties tend to lose at the polls (Rose and Mackie 1983; Müller and Strøm 2000). That raises the obvious and interesting question of whether parties that govern for the first time are more vulnerable than parties that have built up some experience as governing parties. At first sight the evidence is quite mixed. The German Greens entered a coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD) in 1998. In 2000 the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) entered a coalition with the ÖVP. The fate of these two parties, however, differed remarkably in the subsequent general elections: in 2002 the German Greens won eight additional seats, while the Freedom Party lost 34 of its 52 seats. The two Belgian Green parties that joined the federal government in 1999, though, lost heavily four years later, with the Flemish Greens even losing all their seats in the federal parliament (see also Chapter 6). The contrast is striking: some new parties gain seats after participating in government, while others lose.
