Populism and the Decline of Social Democracy

2021

The decline of social democratic parties in Western Europe has received substantial academic attention, but there remains little consensus on how these parties might reverse their electoral fortunes. Drawing on a new study, Matt Polacko argues that in an age of rising inequality, social democrats stand to benefit from shifting to the left on the economy

transform! Yearbook 2022, Merlin Press (Walter Baier, Eric Canepa, Haris Golemis eds), 2022

2018

Only a handful of European states are currently governed by left-wing governments, and several of the traditionally largest left-wing parties, such as the Socialist Party in France, have experienced substantial drops in support. Jan Rovny argues that while many commentators have linked the left’s decline to the late-2000s financial crisis, the weakening of Europe’s left reflects deep structural and technological changes that have reshaped European society, leaving left-wing parties out in the cold.

Brave New Europe (Berlin, Germany), 2018

Europe is witnessing the disappearance of social democratic political parties (Spain being the only exception at the moment). Traditional conservative parties are heading inexorably in the same direction. Europe is going through radical changes with regard to parties. The question is if political policies will change or neo-liberalism will continue to prevail?

2015

Political science literature has extensively described social democracy’s ‘two metamorphoses’. First there was the establishment of social democratic parties as major government parties in the ‘Keynesian State’ period and then their ‘de-social-democratisation’ after the 1970s, while the renovation promoted by Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder was associated with electoral success at the end of the 1990s. The propulsive power of this new social democratic identity was then rapidly exhausted. Until the last days before the 2014 European elections, opinion polls carried out in EU member countries allowed the social democrats to hope that they could pass the 200-seat threshold in the 751-seat European Parliament (EP) and make good the setback they had suffered five years earlier. Indeed, in 2009 only a quarter of the MEPs belonged to the EP’s S&D group, which was at an historically low level. We will first show that social democracy managed to stabilise its weight in the EP only while continuing to decline in percentage of votes. This result should be seen in the context of the historic trajectory of a political family of parties that we extensively studied in The Palgrave Handbook of Social Democracy.2We will next address the present state of this family of parties in the middle of capitalism’s structural crisis and the dilemmas it faces in the very peculiar regime of the European Union. The social democrats, because of their own history, have tied themselves up in a bundle of constraints — which are creating their present difficulties. For this reason, they will probably not be of much help in putting an end to the austerity that is devastating the European continent. This will be the last point covered by this article.

Cevipol Working Paper, 2021

In spite of the fact that a considerable number of words have been written on European Social Democracy, some angles have yet to be considered. One can witness conflicting interpretations on the current state of European Social Democracy. For some, the resilience of European socialism is a reality. For others, it is in obvious decline, and, if one follows the lifespan pointed out by Pedersen to its logical conclusion, the end is nigh. The purpose of this paper is to weigh up these differing views regarding the fate of European Social Democracy and to understand the electoral dynamics underpinning the movement over a period of 150 years. Based on an analysis of 692 elections hold in 32 European States between 1870 and 2019, four major stages in the electoral history of Social Democracy are isolated : a) a gradual emergence at the end of the 19th century and a first flight at the start of the 20th, b) the establishment of the parties in the European political landscape at the close of WWI and an electoral peak more or less reached from the 1930’s in established democracies, c) a stabilisation of this performance over half a century and d) a downturn which started in the 1980’s, leading to a very marked decline in the 2010’s. The European family of socialists suffered a catastrophic decline between 2010 and 2019. The electoral history of European Social Democracy is put into perspective with that of the whole socio-economic left, which makes it possible to point out not only the marked fall in the contemporary period but also the loss of influence of Social Democracy within the left spectrum.

Government and Opposition, 2015

Social Democracy in Europe, 2005

Has not all been already written, explained or examined on the various golden ages or stages of the (unavoidable) decline of Social Democracy? Without a doubt, Social Democracy is the political family that has engendered the greatest amount of research on its different facets, especially in terms of progress and decline in its political influence, existence or political action.

2015

The article presents Polish and Hungarian main left -wing parties in the period of political transformation. There are a few sections in the article that develop the research prob‐ lem: the genesis and development of the parties from 1989 to 2014, a comparative analysis of the two parties based on quantitative indices. One can say there are some similarities between SLD and MSzP. The parties were trans‐ formed from communist hegemon formations, then participated in free parliamentary elections with some successes, created several governments and both have recently faced considerable loss of support. SLD and MSzP belong to the parties that influenced Polish and Hungarian transformation greatly.

2004

Socialist and Social Democratic parties leave few political observers and citizens indifferent. For several years, a certain number of actors on the political scene have presented it as a political family in crisis, lacking in imagination and dynamism, incapable of renewal and doomed to fade into insignificance. Others, on the contrary, describe it as a grouping with a promising, even brilliant future. This book does not set out to confirm either of those two visions. Its aim is to analyse in-depth the transformations which are affecting, at the current time, the different aspects of Social Democracy: new organisational models, changes in political and electoral performance, changing relations with the trade unions and civil society associations, reactions to the emergence of new political rivais and new values, new ideological trends and political programmes, etc. For the first time, the analysis does not concern exclusively Western Europe, but also deals with the Social Democratic parties of the consolidated democracies and the organisations that claim to be part of democratic socialism in Central and Eastern Europe, and highlights the specific characteristics and points in common. At the dawn of the 21st century, it is therefore the challenges and the different responses to those challenges that are analysed by several of the leading European specialists in Social Democratic parties in Europe. "

Bonn : FES, 2010; ISBN 978-3-86872-436-3 Electronic ed.: Berlin

2014

Georg Menz (ed.), The Resistible Corrosion of Europe`s Center Left After 2008. Routledge: Abingdon, New York, 2022

Social scientific analysis of current developments in Austrian political parties is a desideratum. This applies not least to the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ). The last substantial publications about the party date back many years and are now inevitably outdated (cf. Ucakar 2006, Müller 1996). While recent political science in Austria has produced little research on political parties, international comparative studies also usually lack relevant sections on Austria. 1 Of course, this does not mean that Austrian social democracy is not a publication topic: on the contrary, calls and appeals for political reorientation (Nowotny 2016; Scheiber 2019; Zeiler 2019), autobiographically inspired reflections from the party's internal perspective (Cap 2018), biographies of its leaders (Petritsch 2010; Misik and Kern 2017), or the presentation of the party's historical "success story" (Androsch et al. 2020) appear at regular intervals. However, most of these publications hardly claim to be critical in terms of social scientific analysis. Even the current book by political scientist Anton Pelinka (2020) is more of a polemic. The following essay first sets out some general historical lines of development and national characteristics before focusing on the last 20 years, i.e. the period since the turn of the millennium. Since the Austrian example in particular has received little attention in the literature compared to others, I will go into more detail about the historical context and peculiarities in the party history of the SPÖ. The central question concerns the reasons for the almost uninterrupted decline of the SPÖ since the 1980s, both in terms of elections and members. As in other European countries, the former core voter group of social democracy, the working class, has become considerably smaller. Moreover, for various reasons, the party ties of workers to social democracy have weakened without new voter groups being won over to any significant extent.

Party Politics, 2019

Social democratic parties are crumbling at the polls. Surprisingly, however, the causes of this demise remain largely unexplored. This article contributes to filling this gap in the research by studying the long-term impact of welfare state generosity on the vote share of social democratic parties in 16 Western European democracies. If the welfare state indeed was a key factor behind social democratic growth in the past, we ask whether the recent plight of these parties is down to a reversal of their previously dominant success factor? The article makes three principal findings. First, we show that social democratic parties primarily benefited electorally from expansive reforms at lower levels of welfare state generosity. Second, we find that this dynamic of diminishing returns also helps explain the demise of the social democratic party family in the whole of Western Europe. Lastly, our results reveal that programmatic turns to the right predict electoral losses in the least genero...