European social democracy is undergoing a transformation. Party programs are diluting the conventional tenets of the Keynesian welfare state with substantial doses of free market pragmatism, on the one hand, and ideas of participatory democracy and communitarian social life organized by the citizens themselves, on the other. At the same time, social democratic parties have also begun to reorganize themselves internally by questioning large bureaucratic mass organizations in favor of looser frameworks. These changes coincide with efforts to refashion the parties' electoral coalitions, which no longer primarily depend on a blue collar core constituency. In this book, I examine how and why social democratic parties in most West European democracies have participated in this transformation in different ways and with widely varying results. These diverse outcomes show that social democracy is not condemned to electoral decline, but that the parties' rejuvenation depends on their capacity to go beyond the parties' programmatic, organizational, and electoral legacies.

This book grew out of previous studies of European left-libertarian parties I conducted in the 1980s. Critics of those works argued that left-libertarian parties may be fleeting phenomena that will decline or disappear once established left parties are able to incorporate their new competitors' issue agenda into their own programmatic appeal. For this reason, I set out to explore the extent to which social democratic parties have embraced left-libertarian concerns and what effect such efforts have had on their new competitors. Soon I discovered that this question was toe narrow to explain the trajectory of European social democracy and of related changes in European party systems more generally.