Trends in Post-transformation Social Democratic Party Responsiveness

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

Abstract

In the latter part of the 20th century many European social democratic parties embraced more market-friendly economic policies and liberal socio-cultural positions. In an era of changing electoral constituencies, we ask are contemporary social democratic parties responsive to shifts in public opinion and if so, are they responsive to shifts in the central tendency of the electorate or of their partisan supporters?

Building from research on party-voter congruence, we argue that the electoral contexts of 21st century Western European democracies create incentives for social democratic parties to adjust their positions on the left-right ideological dimension to eliminate previous incongruence between themselves and their partisan constituents rather than responding to shifts in the mean voter position. But this does not necessarily lead to policy-seeking, ideological extremity from these parties. Responsiveness to their supporters leads social democratic parties to move to the left or to the right because previous incongruence results from parties being to the right or to the left of their supporters.

Analyses based on a series of datasets that use expert surveys and election surveys to measure parties’ positions and several cross-national and national surveys to measure voters’ preferences between 1999-2014 provide strong support for this assertion. In a second step, we examine social democratic party responsiveness on the more specific policy areas of redistribution, immigration, and European integration. Our findings challenge many of the empirical results from prior studies on party responsiveness to public opinion shifts, with important ramifications for our understanding of party-based representation in contemporary European democracies.

Authors

• Jonathan Polk, University of Gothenburg

• Raimondas Ibenskas, University of Bergen