The missing left? Economic crisis and the programmatic response of social democratic parties in Europe

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Abstract (may include machine translation)

How have social democratic parties responded to the recent economic crisis? For many observers, the Great Recession and the prevalence of austerity in response to it have contributed to a crisis of social democracy in Europe. This article examines the programmatic response of social democratic parties to this crisis in 11 Western European countries. It uses an original data set that records the salience that parties attribute to different issues and the positions that they adopt with regard to these issues during electoral campaigns and compares the platforms of social democratic parties before and after 2008. For this purpose, the article disentangles economic issues into three different categories and shows that this is necessary in order to understand party competition during the Great Recession: while social democratic parties shifted to the left with regard to issues relating to welfare and economic liberalism, they largely accepted the need for budgetary rigour and austerity policies.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)23-38
Number of pages16
JournalParty Politics
Volume24
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2018
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Western Europe
  • economic issues
  • elections
  • party change/adaptation
  • political parties

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