In this chapter, we study voter preferences for different social democratic programmatic strategies. In line with the theoretical framework of the volume, we suggest that there are four different strategies social democratic parties could currently pursue: Old Left, New Left, Centrist, or Left National.

In original surveys conducted in six European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and Sweden), we present these four strategies to respondents in the form of tabular vignettes. Evaluations of these vignettes are used to examine which programmatic strategies resonate with, on the one hand, the general electorate, and, on the other hand, the potential social democratic electorate. We also study support for the different programmatic strategies across subgroups of voters, and we analyze the determinants of voters’ choice between particular social democratic strategies and matched competitor party programs.

Our findings show that while in the overall electorate, Centrist Left and Left National programmatic profiles enjoy high levels of support, potential social democratic voters on average more strongly support Old Left and New Left programs. We find that from the perspective of voters, there might be less of a trade-off between “redistribution and recognition” policies than public debates would have us think. In line with these findings, we show that choices between social democratic parties and their direct competitors are responsive to programmatic supply within the left bloc. However, the choice between social democratic parties and parties of the Right is much less strongly affected by social democratic positioning.

This chapter provides an analytical framework for the empirical studies comprised in the volume. It starts by defining the relevant temporalities to study party strategies and sociostructural processes of electoral realignment. The chapter then develops the concept of the “social democratic idea” that underlies the entire left field of political parties. The third section defines four key structural challenges to the social democratic idea and the potential responses and trade-offs resulting from them for the left field. The fourth section discusses party strategic alternatives to respond to structural challenges and transformations of the social democratic electorate and then differentiates this discussion by different contexts characterized by political-economic legacies and institutions. The chapter concludes with an outline of the book.

The concluding chapter first provides a brief summary of the main findings reported in the multiple complementary investigations on which this book reports. The second task of the conclusion to this volume is to address influential alternative accounts that have attracted considerable scholarly attention and to discuss them considering the cumulative empirical evidence we have presented throughout this book. On the one hand, rival accounts challenge that there is any durable structure of voter-party alignments left in contemporary party systems and democratic polities have entered a world of fluidity, in which the tactical moves of – (social) media enabled – political entrepreneurs are what really counts. On the other hand, a different tier of rival accounts sees not partisan dealignment and the fluidity of media democracy as the problem of traditional left-wing parties, but the failure of social democratic parties to act on the disempowerment of wage earners by capitalist business interests whose leverage has been magnified through globalization of the movement of goods, services, people, and capital. In the very brief third and final section of this book, we posit that the partisan realignments of the past generation on which we report in this volume may not generate a durable equilibrium of party competition. In the twenty-first century, party politicians may be able to map still a subset of novel upcoming emerging policy issues on the existing dimensions of partisan alignment. But there may be profound political challenges in the offing that could disorganize existing party systems fundamentally.

European social democratic parties have lost massive vote shares over the past twenty years. However, their electoral potential – that is, the number of voters who include the social democratic party in their consideration set – is still very high, at about 40–50% on average.

In this chapter, I use EES data on individual voting propensities from 2004 to 2019 in ten countries of Continental, Nordic, and Southern Europe to compare electoral potentials, overlaps with rival party electorates, as well as the sociodemographic profile of voters who are part of inward or outward overlaps between social democratic parties and their rivals.

I find that overlaps are highest within the left field, especially between green/left-libertarian and the social democratic electorates: About 50% of social democratic and green voters could also imagine voting for the other party, compared to only 10–20% between the social democratic and radical right parties. Moreover, the majorities of inward and outward overlaps – especially within the left field – concentrate among middle-class voters with medium or high levels of education.

The last section of the analyses compares in- and outward overlaps and discusses them in relation to the four programmatic strategies developed in this book. In relative terms, I find the New Left strategy to be the one for which potential electoral gains from green and left-libertarian parties seem both highest, as well as most realistic, compared to on average very low potential losses to the Right, in particular to the Radical Right. Overall, however, outward overlaps are systematically higher than inward overlaps for social democratic parties.

This chapter examines the changing political geography of social democratic support. It argues that structural changes in the knowledge economy mean that Social Democrats increasingly face distinct competitors in different types of regions. In more knowledge intensive urban areas, they face new green-left competitors, while the Moderate and Radical Right are key competitors in rural areas and suburbs. In less knowledge intensive regions, Social Democrats have maintained more of the vote share, but face new radical left competitors. These geographic patterns speak to a larger fragmentation of the political space in Europe and beyond, that can make a singular national competitive strategy increasingly difficult for the left. The paper draws on an original dataset of highly localized electoral results.

In the last few decades, many moderate left parties adopted centrist strategies. These strategies did not only involve a programmatic repositioning but also the implementation of a set of economic policies with substantial distributive effects. What are the consequences of these policies? This chapter assesses the electoral costs associated with centrist policies by focusing on the case of fiscal consolidations. It considers the relationship between different types of fiscal consolidations and the electoral performance of social democratic parties. The results suggest that implementing fiscal consolidations is risky for social democratic parties but that not all fiscal consolidations are equal. Social democratic parties lose particularly badly when they implement spending-based consolidations that cut investment spending or public sector wages. Fiscal consolidations centered around tax increases are not associated with losses. Most forms of fiscal consolidations have a smaller or no effect on the likelihood to win office, but they still decrease the size of the left field. Overall, this suggests that fiscal consolidations, which hurt key constituencies of social democratic parties, are particularly costly for social democratic parties.

This chapter follows individual voter flows using panel data for Social Democrats in Germany (1984–2018), the United Kingdom (1991–2018), and Switzerland (1999–2018). To the best of our knowledge, this chapter provides the first long-running study of individual voting transitions among social democratic voters. We aim at a better understanding of contemporary electoral choices of initial social democratic voters and of the individual-level characteristics that predict either staying with or leaving Social Democrats. We find that Social Democrats manage to keep some of their core but a lot of support gets demobilized or moves on to a various electoral competitors, especially to more progressive options (Greens, LibDem, Green Liberal Party). In all three countries under consideration, Social Democrats struggle to attract new voters. This tendency is slightly less pronounced in Switzerland, which we think is at least partly due to the particularly progressive programmatic offer of the Swiss SP. By contrast, the German SPD loses to everyone and gains almost nothing. We also find evidence for an aging core group of social democratic voters, highlighting a certain risk of going extinct: The key factor correlated with “leaving” is the generational cohort Social Democrats belong to. By contrast, often theorized and emphasized factors such as occupation, income, or unemployment show much smaller correlations with former Social Democrats' decision to leave the party behind.

Why do voters accede to or abandon social democratic parties in the most recent decades? This chapter analyzes the reasons that motivate voters go choose among parties. Are spatial considerations coming into play, that is, do voters move to parties that are more consistent with their preferences than those they abandon? This chapter tests this argument with European Election Study data from 1999 to 2019 focusing on those respondents who report a different party preference at the time of a survey compared to their past vote recall (“vote switchers”). The data reveal a robust relationship between switching direction and voter preferences, bearing out rational spatial theories of voting. For Social Democrats’ strategy considerations, however, this brings to light an inconvenient fact: Voters abandon their parties for very different reasons heading to a plurality of alternatives. Consequently, no unified party strategy can stop the vote hemorrhage on all fronts of competition.

Pundits have attributed the frequency of party leadership churns as a factor in the decline of the German Social Democrats. But have leadership changes and their frequency contributed to the German SPD’s and other social democratic parties’ declines across parliamentary systems? More generally, when and why do political parties change their leaders, and what are the electoral consequences of these changes? Using original party leadership data from ten parliamentary democracies across three decades, we show that while factors that affect leader durations in office vary across countries/regions, there are no unique factors influencing social democratic leaders’ tenure. In addition, while leadership changes and the frequency of leadership changes have some minor impact on polling results, they do not influence election results, and once again, their effects do not vary across party families. Our results have important implications for the party organizations and electoral outcomes literatures and call into question the recent argument about the increasing presidentialization of politics in parliamentary systems.

This chapter focuses on the electoral performance of social democratic parties in different institutional and competitive contexts. We explore three avenues to shed light on the relationship between social democratic parties’ strategic interaction with competitors and their respective electoral payoffs. We start from premises of spatial theories of party competition but hypothesize only behavioral relations between party choices and electoral outcomes, not strategic equilibrium configurations. We ask three questions: first, holding all other parties’ positions constant, do party positions closer to the center of a policy dimension – where empirically most voters are located – pay off in electoral terms and does this effect vary across relevant dimension of party competition? Second, does distance of parties from competitors improve their electoral fortunes? Taking spatial considerations of the first two questions together, are parties electorally better off if they place themselves closer to the center of policy spaces, while simultaneously facing only distant competitors? Third, what are the electoral consequences of two focal parties – a moderate left (social democratic) and a moderate right (conservative or Christian Democratic or People’s) party – simultaneously choosing positions in a multiparty field? These consequences may be different for the individual parties and for their ideological “field.” The performance of individual parties turns out to be much in line with spatial theory: When Social Democrats move to the center, they are likely to win voters from the center-right, but lose votes to green-left and radical-left parties within the left field. Social Democrats often perform stronger when they move left than to the center. But there is a crucial difference between their choices when it comes to considering the electoral performance of the entire set of left-field parties. By moving to the center, and shedding votes to their leftist competitors, Social Democrats sometimes effectively increase the size of the leftist field and thereby also boost their own bargaining power over coalition governments, as they are usually the most moderate party in the left field and most capable of crafting coalitions with parties of the center-right, particularly if Social Democrats control the median voter.

To what extent does moderation in ideological positioning by social democratic parties affect their short- and long-term electoral fortunes? Do existing social democratic electorates respond differently to moderation from the major parties of the Moderate Left on the economic as opposed to the cultural dimension? Previous research suggests that social democratic parties received an influx of centrist voters post-moderation but that these new centrist voters were less attached to the party and left in later elections, as did left-leaning social democrats frustrated by moderation strategies. This chapter further probes whether there is a link between moderation and individual voters’ shifts from social democratic parties at a later point, by considering a larger number of cases and by differentiating between the economic and cultural dimensions. We examine individual-level data on voting behavior combined with information on mainstream left parties’ ideological shifts in up to fifty elections in sixteen countries over recent decades. The findings show that (a) moderation can have detrimental consequences in the longer term; (b) the consequences of moderation differ across the left-right and cultural dimensions of electoral competition; and (c) the combination of individual-level analysis, with broader contextual and systemic considerations, is essential to fully engage with these questions.

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. By contrast, the cultural narrative focuses on the liberal positions of social democratic parties on new issues relating to cultural issues such as immigration, gender equality, and European integration and points 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 eight 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. By contrast, they are strongly linked to choices between social democratic and green/left-libertarian parties. These findings cast doubt on both predominant narratives of social democratic decline.

The relationship between social democratic parties and labor unions is of interest for the entire era of labor mobilization since the nineteenth century. The middle-class shift in the employment structure of West European countries, the emergence of second-dimension politics, and the pluralization and fragmentation of the “left field” raise several questions in this regard: Have the constituencies of left parties and trade unions developed in parallel or they diverged? Consequently, do the average preferences of trade union members and left voters align or diverge? Do unionized left voters sort increasingly into radical left, social democratic or green and left-libertarian parties?

In this chapter, we address the subject of union–party relations and how it relates to social democratic fortunes with microlevel data on membership, political preference profiles, and electoral behavior. We find that the bond between labor unionists and social democrats is anchored in a rather close similarity and convergence of policy preferences. This proximity of beliefs is not limited to questions of economic redistribution but also covers policy issues concerning societal governance and immigration. In many instances, unionists are – on average – more libertarian on questions pertaining to the dimension of societal governance and more inclusive and universalistic on questions of citizenship than nonunionized social democratic voters. In consequence, unionists are progressively less an uncontested electoral preserve of Social Democracy.

This chapter analyzes the class base of support for left-wing parties in Western Europe, in light of early political socialization and patterns of intergenerational social mobility. We ask to what extent contemporary left-wing party support is a legacy of political socialization in the traditional social democratic constituency class of industrial workers – and if this is a sustainable model for future social democratic support considering postindustrial occupational transformation and upgrading. By investigating support for the Social Democrats in contrast to green and left-libertarian, radical left, and moderate and radical right parties, we identify the main competitors of the Social Democrats among classes traditionally associated with social democratic support. Analyses using the European Social Survey (2002–10) indicate three main findings. First, the composition of the electorates indicates that Social Democrats rely more than other parties on support from individuals socialized in the industrial working class, while contemporary patterns show that one-third of the social democratic electorate now stems from the middle class and workers make up the largest part of the radical right electorate. Second, as expected, contemporary middle-class social democratic support is largely a legacy from socialization in the working class, especially among older generations in Northwestern Europe. Third, new legacies are being built along postindustrially realigned patterns, as offspring of sociocultural professionals is relatively more likely to vote for the Left, but for the Green Left or Radical Left instead of the Social Democrats. However, the impact of socialization among younger generations appears to be weaker than the one identified for working-class origins in older generations. These results imply that relying on middle-class support alone is not a viable long-term strategy for the Social Democrats, given the seemingly unique impact of past industrial alignments that is unparalleled by other class–party linkages among younger generations.