The Politics of Social Democracy

Issues, Dilemmas and Future Directions for the Centre-Left

Rob Manwaring

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429648793
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book addresses the meaning of contemporary social democracy and how the centre-left is navigating through its current identity crisis, through a series of cases of social democratic and labour parties across Europe and the Anglosphere.

The book examines the ideological, policy, electoral and organisational dilemmas facing the centre-left. Taking in cases including those from the UK, Austria, France, Germany, Scandinavia, Australia, and New Zealand, it outlines and explores the current and future trajectories of the family of centre-left parties.

This text will be of key interest to students, scholars and interested readers of labour and social democratic politics, centre-left political parties, trade unions, the future of the centre-left, and more broadly to those studying political parties, European and comparative politics.

1

The meaning of social democracy

Introduction

What is the meaning of modern social democracy? Is social democracy still a coherent political phenomenon, or does it represent something of a ‘zombie’ category in political science – a label that describes a broad family of political parties but lacks any clear analytical precision? What does a ‘social democrat’ stand for, and what are ‘social democratic’ politics, in the early twenty-firstt century? If, for some, the meaning of social democracy has changed – what has it changed from, and what are its future trajectories? These questions form the core of this book – to examine the meaning of contemporary social democracy.

In this introductory chapter, the core themes and framework for understanding contemporary social democracy are set out. If we view social democracy through the prism of the electoral fortunes of the family of labour and social democratic political parties (e.g. British Labour, the German SPD, and so on) then social democracy appears in decline or crisis (Diamond 2016a, Keating and McCrone 2013; Manwaring and Kennedy 2018). Across a number of advanced industrial countries, the main centre-left political parties are performing poorly. A few examples give a striking impression of the poor health of social democracy. At the 2017 general election in the Netherlands, the Dutch Labour party (PvdA) recorded its worst ever electoral result winning just 5.7% of the vote and holding on to just 9 seats in the 150-seat parliament. The collapse of the PvdA is illustrative given that they won a solid 24.8% of the vote in the 2012 election (Oudenampsen 2020). They may, of course, bounce back.

Across the border in France, the Presidential elections in the same year also saw a record defeat for the PvdA’s sister party – the Parti Socialiste (PS). Benoit Hamon secured just over 6% of the vote in the first round, and notably neither of the traditional major French political party candidates reached the second round, with Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! party beating le Pen’s Front Nationale. In Germany, arguably not since the 2002 election has the SPD led electoral politics and set the political agenda. In the UK, the rise and fall of the Corbyn leadership of the British Labour party posed some profound existential questions of British social democracy; the Labour party has not won a general election since 2005, and it was heavily defeated in 2019. Elsewhere across the advanced industrial world, whilst the results may not have been quite as calamitous, there is a picture of structural decline for many social democratic and labour parties. Chapter 8 of this book takes a more forensic look at the electoral health of the social democratic family, but recent results in the Netherlands, France, and Greece are outliers of a story of decline of social democracy.

Yet, if we are seeking to find meaning in the state of modern social democracy, the electoral story only provides a limited picture; and we need to interrogate this political phenomenon in a broader context. To do this, this introductory chapter sets out the core underpinning themes, concepts, and debates of the book.

This chapter has four main sections. First the chapter tackles the definitional issues of social democracy. What exactly is ‘social democracy’ and how do we best define, categorise, and identify it? This book sets out a three-fold definition of social democracy. In common with other writers, social democracy is best understood as a multidimensional political phenomenon. To define social democracy, we need to disaggregate it into its core constituent elements, and in this chapter social democracy is defined as a model (a relatively coherent policy programme), an ideology (a cluster of inter-linking ideas), and as an empirical project carried out by political actors (traditionally the family of social democratic political parties). As explored below, this three-fold approach enables us to better understand this notoriously slippery and complex phenomenon. Throughout the book, the conceptual glue of ‘dilemmas’ is used to illustrate how these different elements of social democracy interact with each other. Dilemmas reflect the strategic choices available to political actors as they draw upon ideological positions to set out new or continuing policy programmes.

In the second part of the chapter, we briefly turn to the issue of ‘theorising’ social democracy and the overall methodological approach of this book.

In the third and main part of the chapter, there is an outline of the current main debates about the state of social democracy. Broadly, we can identify three dominant narratives about social democracy – namely ‘death’, ‘crisis’, and ‘transition’. Here, the key recent literature on social democracy is reviewed, and these debates yield crucial insights about how we might best understand the current plight of social democrats.

The final section of the chapter identifies the main cases, introduces the core dilemmas, and plots the overall book. The aim is relatively simple – to explore the contemporary meaning of social democracy through a series of dilemmas and issues.

Understanding social democracy: Models, ideas, actors

Different writers, invariably, employ different research and definitional strategies. On one level, a useful starting point is to reduce social democracy to is core elements, for example, Isabelle Hertner (2018, 1) employs Keating and McCrone’s (2013, 2–3) definition of social democracy as:

a set of intuitive ideas about fairness and equality and a moral economy that refuses to accept the automatic primacy of markets or the need for inequality.

Or, following Hay (1999, 57) social democracy revolves around three main themes (cited in Pierson 2001, 15):

• A commitment to redistribution
• A commitment to democratic economic governance
• A commitment to social protectionism

As Chris Pierson shrewdly notes, this captures the core of social democracy but is paradoxically a ‘litmus test’ that is both too modest and also too demanding (Pierson, 2001, 16). Whilst these approaches offer an important starting point to understand the landscape of social democracy, they can struggle to capture both the variety of contemporary social democracy and its historical forms. One way of developing this approach is to disaggregate social democracy into different constituent elements.

For the purposes of this volume, a three-fold definition of social democracy is adopted. Here, social democracy is conceived of as a model or series of models (a relatively coherent policy historically situated programme), as an ideological project (a set of systematic values and ideas), and as a political actor or agent (most commonly associated with the family of social democratic and labour parties). These different constituent elements coalesce but also diverge. The three-pronged definitional approach reflects the ‘synthetic’ strategy employed by Randall (2003). This strategy does not prioritise any theoretical approach, but rather seeks to understand social democracy as a multidimensional phenomenon which is a dynamic interplay of ideas, structure, and agency.

Social democracy as a model

First, we can locate social democracy in the typology literature and view it as a changing set of models. Following Randall (2007), a model of social democracy might include its meta-values, its policy goals and aims. For Randall, the key meta beliefs are a belief in progress, a positive view of human nature, and situating the individual within society (2007, 8). Or, as Randall argues, ‘Social democracy is positioned midway between the ontological individualism of classical liberalism and the collectivism of the Marxist tradition’ (2007, 8). Randall then suggests some key characteristics of social democracy, and he ‘operationalises’ this approach by focusing on the main policy aims and goals (in his case, the British Labour party). This dovetails with others, such as Bonoli and Powell (2004), who disaggregate social democracy into different component parts, including its discourse, ideology, and policy goals and mechanisms.

The ‘models’ approach does not necessarily mean we identify fixed, historical models (e.g. Keynesian Demand Management from the 1950s to 1970s in the ‘golden age’), and then insist that this is a fixed or ‘true’ version of social democracy. Rather, we use the typologies and models to help understand and map historical changes in social democracy. Accordingly, different writers have identified different models of social democracy.

For example, Moschonas (2002, 15) identifies two main models, the ‘gradualist’ and the ‘partisan’. The ‘gradualist’ tradition emphasises the social democratic compromise with capitalism and the focus on reform on the political economy. Moschonas draws upon a Crosland-ite model of social democracy with many of the familiar elements, including:

• Political liberalism
• Mixed economy
• Welfare states
• Keynesian economy policy
• Commitment to equality

Moschonas identifies a second, narrower, model which is a much more specifically partisan project, built upon a close alliance of social democratic (and labour) parties and trade unions to foster the aims/goals of the working class.

Keman (1993, 2017) identifies two different models of social democracy, namely revisionism and reformism. The revisionist model focusses on understanding how the original goals and aims of social democracy are updated (or revised) to fit modern circumstances. The second approach – reformism – is where scholars seeks to understand social democracy through the incremental and piecemeal changes to capitalism. Others, for example, Shaw (2012, 19), see broad models of social democracy in specific country contexts – e.g. for the UK, Shaw identifies a strong redistributivist strand (a focus on equality and collectivism) and also an ‘ethical socialist’ strand (a focus on fellowship, and public sector ethos). In sum, different writers apply different priorities or dimensions of focus in different models of social democracy.

If we locate the ‘models approach’ in broad historical perspective, it allows us to see how some core characteristics of social democratic politics have changed over time. This correlates broadly to Przeworski’s (2001) different waves of social democracy. As explored later in the book, Przeworski identified three main waves: revolution, revisionism, and remedialism, and a potential fourth wave – resignation. Outlined in Table 1.1, is a stylized outline of four potential models of social democracy, namely socialism, ‘classic’ (Crosland-ite) social democracy, the third way, and, finally, a suggestive ‘fourth phase’ social democracy.

Table 1.1 Models of social democracy

Dimensions	Socialism	‘Classic’ social democracy	Third Way...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The meaning of social democracy
• 2 The ideology of social democracy
• 3 Ideological dilemmas
• 4 Social democracy and policy change
• 5 Dilemmas of political economy
• 6 Dilemmas of welfare and social policy
• 7 Dilemmas of immigration
• 8 Electoral dilemmas
• 9 Dilemmas in office
• 10 Organisational dilemmas
• 11 The next wave of social democracy?
• References
• Appendices
• Index