The party politics of learning from failure: the German Greens and the lessons drawn from the 2013 general election

Abstract

Exploring the party political learning of the German Greens, a powerful agent of environmental policy in European politics, we identify the strategic and programmatic lessons learned from their failure in the 2013 general elections and explain the party politics that facilitated these lessons. We advance research on learning from failures by understanding failures not as objective facts but as constructed in political discourse. Tracing the main discursive elements of failure constructions, we argue that such constructions empower agents of learning and direct what actors learn from failures. Party elites might engage in strategic constructions of failures to promote their agenda and position in the party. Empirically tracing how the party political discourse of the German Greens constructed the 2013 elections as a failure, we demonstrate how this discursive construction intertwines with party politics and helped shift the intra-party balance of power and political direction of the Greens.