In this book I have argued that changes in the socioeconomic class structure of advanced capitalism and in the organization of political-economic institutions, such as the welfare state and channels of interest group intermediation, reshape the stage on which social democratic parties compete by influencing the nature of citizens' political demands that are articulated in the political arena. The nature of citizens' political preferences, in turn, delimits the range of social democratic appeals that promise success at the polls as well as participation in governments.

Advanced capitalism tends to transform citizens' preferences as well as their capacity for collective organization and political action. New experiences at intellectually more demanding and versatile workplaces, particularly in the rapidly expanding client-interactive professions of the personal service sector, foster a construction of political demands that places more emphasis on individual self-realization and direct political participation than on questions of economic income distribution and security. Conversely, the losers of the modernization process, primarily young less skilled blue and white collar workers in manufacturing industries and the marginal self-employed, express an authoritarian backlash against the advanced liberal democracies and call for a hierarchical social and political order that undercuts the dynamism and the participatory desires of the new libertarian social strata.

The social democratic Keynesian welfare state, established in the post–World War II era, has contributed to the transformation of citizens' preferences, but now becomes a victim of its own success.