Social Democratic Partisan Appeals and Electoral Constituency Support

• In Event: Social Democracy. From Transformation to Demise?

Abstract

The composition of party constituencies has transformed profoundly across the Western democracies. The most striking electoral realignment consists in specific parts of the middle class becoming the paramount electoral basis for Social Democracy. Today, social democratic parties rely on very different core constituencies, the manufacturing working class and the educated middle class, the latter being larger because of occupational change, and because of the decreasing likelihood of workers to vote left. Representing the preferences of these two constituencies jointly is difficult, because – as the paper will show - they diverge in terms of their socio-cultural and economic preferences.
In this context of an electoral dilemma, academic and political discussions address the question whether programmatic shifts – either towards more radical left-wing economic or towards more culturally conservative claims - could allow social democratic parties to win back working class votes. The answer to this question depends on the share of voters who are indeed torn between voting for the Social Democrats and rival parties, and on the policy preferences of these voters.

Therefore, my paper will use voting propensity data from the European Election Survey (2004-2014) to study the overlaps in the electoral potentials of social democratic parties and their main rivals. The analysis will also allow estimating the “price” social democratic parties would have to pay for moving towards the preferences of their working class electorate, through an analysis of the electoral overlaps between the (middle class) voters of the social democrats and other culturally liberal parties.

Author

• Silja Haeusermann, University of Zurich