Losing the Middle Ground: The electoral decline of Social Democratic parties since 2000

This is a chapter from an edited volume, Beyond Social Democracy: The Transformation of the Left in
Emerging Knowledge Societies, edited by Silja Häusermann and Herbert Kitschelt.
Abstract: Two widespread narratives attempt to account for the decline of social democratic parties over the past decades. The economic narrative points to these parties’ centrist positioning as the key cause and the Radical Left and Right as the key beneficiaries. In contrast, the cultural narrative focuses of the liberal positions of social democratic parties on new issues relating to cultural issues such as immigration, gender equality and European integration, and paints to the Radical Right as key beneficiaries. What links these two narratives is the idea that social democrats have alienated the working class. In this chapter, we use individual-level survey data from 8 countries to show that although social democratic parties have seen losses among all electoral groups, the voters who left social democratic parties were disproportionately centrist and educated. Second, we find that only a small share of former social democratic voters defected directly to parties of the Radical Right. Instead, social democratic parties lost most voters to moderate right, green and left-libertarian parties. We additionally show that cultural attitudes play only a small role for choosing between moderate right and social democratic parties. In contrast, they are strongly to choices between social democratic and green/left-libertarian parties. These findings cast doubt on both predominant narratives of social democratic decline.

此章节摘自由Silja Häusermann和Herbert Kitschelt编纂的《超越社会民主：新兴知识社会左翼的转型》一书。摘要：关于过去几十年社会民主党的衰落，存在两种广为流传的叙事。经济叙事将社会民主党的中间立场视为主要原因，并将激进的左翼和右翼视为主要受益者。相对而言，文化叙事则聚焦于社会民主党在移民、性别平等和欧洲一体化等新文化议题上的自由立场，并将激进的右翼描绘为关键受益者。这两个叙事之间的共同点在于，社会民主党使工人阶级感到疏远。在本章中，我们利用来自8个国家的个体层次调查数据表明，尽管社会民主党在所有选民群体中均遭遇损失，但离开社会民主党的选民在中间派和受过教育的人群中占比过高。其次，我们发现只有一小部分前社会民主党选民直接转向激进的右翼政党。相反，社会民主党大多数选民流失至温和的右翼、绿色和左翼自由主义政党。此外，我们还发现，在温和的右翼政党与社会民主党之间，文化态度在选择上仅扮演了微小的角色。相反，它们在社会民主党与绿色/左翼自由主义政党之间的选择中扮演了至关重要的角色。这些发现对两种主导的社会民主党衰落叙事提出了质疑。