14.3.1 Decrease of Mainstream Left Parties as a Process of Dealignment, Volatility, and Agency-Driven Destructuration

A large part of the research on party system fragmentation, party competition, and political polarization has come to focus on the weakening or even loss of social structuration of electoral behavior. Starting from the observation of weakening class and religious voting (Dalton Reference Dalton2004), many studies argued that party politics in advanced democracies was undergoing a process of individualization, dealignment, and increasing volatility of electoral behavior. Accordingly, social groups – structural sociodemographic groups in particular – were argued to be ever less relevant to explain electoral preferences and electoral choice, at the benefit of more short-term, fluid and issue-based voting (Dalton, Flanagan and Beck 1984; Franklin, Mackie and Valen Reference Franklin, Mackie and Valen1992; Thomassen Reference Thomassen2005). Building on this early literature on issues and dealignment, many recent studies have emphasized the agency that political actors and policy entrepreneurs have in strategically politicizing issues, raising or mitigating issue saliency and even shaping attitudinal patterns among increasingly volatile voters (e.g., Green-Pedersen Reference Green-Pedersen2019; De Vries and Hobolt Reference De Vries and Hobolt2020). This strand of research identifies the decline of center left parties as a result of the inability of traditional party elites – constrained and captured by organizational, issue-based, and historic legacies – to adapt to changing competitive challenges, and the fragmentation of party systems as an outcome of increasingly individualistic, short-term considerations of voters who respond to a proliferating set of appeals by opportunistic issue entrepreneurs.

We can distinguish two versions of this theoretical “destructuration” argument, a stronger one and a weaker one. The stronger version argues that there are basically no structurally patterned and/or stable party or policy preferences of voters left, at all. Political preferences are almost entirely malleable to the strategies of political elites. Voter attitudes are seen as endogenous in political (group) identities (rather than policy preferences or rational-material, spatial considerations), which – in turn – are created and fostered by political elites, or brought into focus by short-term political events (Achen and Bartels Reference Achen and Bartels2016; Mason Reference Mason2018; Hobolt et al. Reference Hobolt, Leeper and Tilley2021). Achen and Bartel’s “Democracy for Realists” (2016) is probably the most resolute account of cognitively myopic and overwhelmed voters whose policy preferences are entirely endogenous in the political identities elites envelop them in.

The more mitigated version of this supply-side and agency-driven account of party-voter destructuration emphasizes – loosely based on Riker’s theory of heresthetics (1980s) – the role of political entrepreneurs who actively, rationally, and opportunistically form and exploit the issue space. Political parties are (more or less savvy, but always rational and opportunistic) political entrepreneurs who strategically politicize issues to attract votes and divide their opponents’ constituencies. Such strategies require fragmented electoral spaces and dealigned voters with no stable party attachment, willing to switch between ideological programs based on short-term issue saliency (De Vries and Hobolt Reference De Vries and Hobolt2020). In this perspective, mainstream centrist parties’ attachment to particular constituencies and topics has become a burden, rather than an asset, impeding them from flexibly seizing novel opportunities in terms of issue saliency and issue framing, while challenger party elites have more entrepreneurial leeway and opportunity.

Our theoretical framework in this book does share quite some common ground with the more moderate version of agency-driven electoral change, as we equally emphasize the relevance of agency in terms of supply-side programmatic strategies and their effects. We also argue that political choice is important, and that parties are rational actors, seeking to emphasize programmatic positions and issues strategically. However, while entrepreneurship is indispensable in politics, it is ubiquitous and mostly electorally unsuccessful. The presence of entrepreneurs is thus not informative to predict party system change. The outliers of successful entrepreneurship, then, cannot be explained without an understanding of the sociostructural realignments that have created opportunities and constraints for a particular subset of entrepreneurs and their strategies. Over the last several decades, it is no coincidence that those who did not fail – green, left-libertarian, and radical right parties in particular – have been thriving on highly similar, consistent appeals to clearly identifiable sociostructural electoral potentials. Entrepreneurs launch appeals, but these appeals need a fertile sociostructural soil to resonate. This sociostructural terrain has become more fragmented, making it harder – or even impossible – for even the most able and well-informed political entrepreneur to appeal to 40% or more of the electorate at the same time. In DeSio and Weber’s terms (2014), sociostructural fragmentation has made “bridge issues” rarer and politicians are stuck in situations in which the “issue yield” of repositioning themselves is nowhere as large as in their heyday. In other words, we do not contest the prevalence and relevance of political entrepreneurs, but social structure constrains their leeway and conditions their success. Hence, the heavy explanatory lifting of party success in our perspective is in the strongly constrained demand-side, rather than in the abundant, versatile, and diverse supply side. This is our main theoretical counterargument against an overtly supply-side–driven perspective on challenger parties as political entrepreneurs.

However, our book also provides manifold specific empirical insights that contradict the answers the issue entrepreneur perspective would give to our two key questions. To the question of which voters center left parties lost, to whom and why, these studies would reply that challenger party elites attracted former mainstream party voters by opportunistically raising “wedge issues” centrist parties were ill disposed to address properly (De Vries and Hobolt Reference De Vries and Hobolt2020). The implication is that we would expect to see losses from mainstream left parties to all challenger parties, both on the Left and on the Right, and to different extents across countries, as party leaders are unlikely to be equally able at strategically devising new issues. We would also expect to see considerable variation in the substantive content of the challenger party agendas, depending on the national opportunity structure and context. However, our findings are at odds with these observable implications: What we indeed see throughout the analyses in this book is that voter flows remain overwhelmingly and narrowly contained within the ideological left field, and both flows and stability concentrate in consistent, identifiable sociodemographic groups of occupational class, education, and age in particular. When voter flows leave the left field, they over-proportionally go to mainstream right parties, rather than to new challenger parties on the right (for the evidence on structured voter flows, see the chapters by Abou-Chadi and Wagner, by Häusermann, Bischof and Kurer, and by Ares and van Ditmars). We also see that voters who switch parties do so in spatially very consistent ways, along encompassing ideological dimensions: We indeed observe robust relationships between the programmatic preferences of these voters along broad ideological dimensions, and the directions in which they switch across countries and over time (see Chapter 7 by Kitschelt and Rehm). Moreover, we see striking similarities between countries, which are incompatible with the contingent and context-specific perspective on opportunistic issue entrepreneurs: In particular, we see cross-national consistency in the directions and extents of voter flows, in the programmatic preferences of left voters over policies and consistent policy bundles (Abou-Chadi, Häusermann, Mitteregger, Mosimann and Wagner), and even in the programmatic supply of (challenger) parties across countries. In short, we see structure and order where the issue-entrepreneur perspective expects volatility and variance, and we see voter flows and voter preferences rooted in sociostructural categories, where purely supply-driven accounts of political transformation would expect heterogeneity and dealignment. Our observations are also in line with the by now massive body of empirical evidence demonstrating realignment along programmatic dimensions (e.g., Kriesi et al. Reference Kriesi, Grande, Lachat, Dolezal, Bornschier and Frey2008; Häusermann and Kriesi Reference Häusermann, Kriesi, Beramendi, Häusermann, Kitschelt and Kriesi2015; Kitschelt and Rehm Reference Kitschelt, Rehm, Beramendi, Häusermann, Kitschelt and Kriesi2015; Dalton Reference Dalton2018; Oesch and Rennwald Reference Oesch and Rennwald2018; Hagevi et al. Reference Hagevi, Blombäck, Demker, Hinnfors and Loxbo2022; Hall et al. Reference Hall, Evans and In Kim2022).

The more radical version of the dealignment argument would contest the strong role we ascribe to sociostructural groups and their preferences as constraining actor strategies by arguing that group belonging and policy preferences are endogenous in elite appeals. Hence, the assumption here is that political parties at least potentially have the ability to form idiosyncratic group identities, to raise the saliency of particular issues and then propose programmatic options along these issues. Endogenizing demand-side attitudes and preferences obviously theoretically expands the scope for strategic agency for all parties. For social democratic parties, in particular, this would mostly likely imply that they could in principle by themselves revive the saliency of economic class conflict above new(er) sociocultural issues, by appealing to vertical class conflict and by emphasizing traditional interests and policies associated with this class conflict.

However, as we have shown in this volume, there is ample evidence that the overall saliency of issues and issue dimensions, as well as the programmatic preferences of voter groups and the importance they attach to particular questions are to a large extent beyond the control of parties – and even more so beyond the control of individual parties. If attitudes and saliency were so dependent on supply-side strategies and appeals, we would witness much more variance in voter attitudes and dimension saliency across time and space. However, the left-wing electoral potential today holds consistently progressive attitudes on both economic-distributive and sociocultural issues, irrespective of the fact that electoral realignment and the rise of challenger parties has emerged in different configurations and at different levels of speed across countries. Furthermore, the changing substance and relevance of politicized group identities, the development of broad attitudinal patterns among these social groups and electoral constituencies, as well as the development of programmatic party profiles have developed in strikingly similar ways across countries (e.g., Kriesi et al. Reference Kriesi, Grande, Lachat, Dolezal, Bornschier and Frey2008, Reference Kriesi, Grande, Dolezal, Helbling, Höglinger, Hutter and Wüest2012; Kitschelt and Rehm Reference Kitschelt, Rehm, Beramendi, Häusermann, Kitschelt and Kriesi2015; Bornschier et al. Reference Bornschier, Häusermann, Zollinger and Colombo2021a; Hall et al. Reference Hall, Evans and In Kim2022). All green parties equally advocate cultural liberalism and liberal immigration policies; all right-wing nationalist parties share not only restrictive immigration stances but also more authoritarian, punitive views of law and order and civil liberties. Also, we have not yet seen the successful uptake of a relevant left-authoritarian political party or movement in any West European country over the past years, even though purely opportunistic models of party competition would predict the emergence of parties with such appeals. The high degree of structuration and consistency of these changes conveys the insight that the voter preferences underlying programmatic politics are rooted in people’s social experiences and that spatial party competition reflects inherent links across ideological-programmatic policy claims, which do not resonate if opportunistically combined. Beyond these consistent attitudinal patterns that contradict an overtly supply-side–driven and constructivist perspective on voter behavior, the continued and consistent structural sorting of voters into different parties – by socioeconomic background and by sociocultural markers of milieus and habits – contradicts a radical dealignment argument. Using outdated categories of structuration (such as old class schemes or income) may obscure how strong the structuration of voting behavior has actually remained, but once we use categories that allow us to adequately capture voters’ economic and social circumstances in the knowledge economy, we understand that despite the “sea of variance and randomness,” which naturally constitutes social reality, party system change reflects a limited set of clearly identifiable sociostructural shifts and central tendencies. This observation does not imply an overly rationalistic understanding of programmatic spatial voting. It is entirely consistent with the idea that voters identify with social and political groups, that these groups are politicized and perpetuated through the interplay of elites and voters, that voters form preferences based not only on material interests but also on identities and group belonging (an idea central to the literature on structural social cleavages and party systems), and that parties can appeal to groups via both policy claims and cues, heuristics and symbols (e.g., Mendelberg Reference Mendelberg2018). Acknowledging the relevance of social groups does not imply subscribing to a purely supply-side–driven understanding of preferences and policy demand, as group identities are rooted in social structure.

14.3.2 Decline of Social Democracy as a Failure to Choose Electorally Superior Party Strategies: The Class-Analytical Framework to Study Social Democratic Decline

This book’s investigation explains the predicaments of Social Democrats’ strategic choices in the context of the changing educational and occupational structures, technological innovation, demographics, and family/gender relations that shape people’s preference distributions on the demand side and the different configurations of party competitors within different institutional settings on the supply side. Capitalism prevails, but social class and the traditional class conflict – understood as the politicized divide between capital owners and wage earners – is not dominant in patterning the competitive partisan dynamics. There is, however, a powerful counter-perspective in the political science literature that challenges our analysis of the left field and provides a rival explanatory account. Politically, this rival perspective has politically energized and enchanted countless radical activists within social democratic parties and the left field. Let us call it the “industrial capitalism” class-centered analysis identifying economic globalization as the main culprit causing social democratic electoral decline when party strategists promote rather than fight it with a muscular agenda of national control and economic redistribution in favor of wage earners.

In examining this alternative explanatory account, we start by stating the positive, empirically testable claims of the class analytical perspective, before appraisal how the empirical findings presented in this book for the most part contradict them. We will then briefly work back to a critical appraisal of the theoretical assumptions about party competition and the underlying political economic framework in which the class analytical perspective is grounded. Let us present the key claims of the class analytical perspective in four propositions.

First proposition, the globalization hypothesis: In light of increasing economic globalization of the flow of all factors of production – and especially capital – labor in affluent capitalist democracies has lost leverage over capital to accept lower profit rates and redistribution necessary to sustain comprehensive welfare states. Capital may invest abroad and reduce domestic employment (offshoring of labor), import goods and services from abroad where it has invested, and shift cheap labor into an economy to depress wages and residual union bargaining power. Globalization threatens to abolish the foundations of the post–World War II democratic class compromise by weakening union power. Globalization also decreases the domestic political “room to maneuver” in macroeconomic fiscal policy that national domestic governments may have enjoyed in a previous era, a claim indeed empirically corroborated by a number of studies (cf. Boix Reference Boix1998; Garrett Reference Garrett1998; Hellwig Reference Hellwig2015; Jahn Reference Jahn2006).

Second proposition, the social democratic acquiescence hypothesis: On the political field, Social Democrats have caved in to the demands of capital, accepted (or even promoted) liberalized trade and capital markets, and stood by idly when the share of GDP accruing to profits rather than wages went up, and cut back welfare state social programs benefiting the working class (e.g., Berman and Snegovaya Reference Berman and Snegovaya2019; Blyth and Katz Reference Blyth and Katz2005; Haupt Reference Haupt2010; Hopkin and Blyth 2019). Social Democrats have moved away from leftist socioeconomic policies of social protection and income redistribution and become engines of economically right-wing “Third Way” politics that systematically ignores the demands of lower wage earners for redistribution and economic security in favor of market mechanisms of allocation and emphasis on individual incentives and competition. This trajectory has been assisted and reinforced by the organizational assimilation of economic ideas originating among liberal pro-market professional economists and seeping inside social democratic parties. These ideas prime economic efficiency and macroeconomic stability of growth (Mudge Reference Mudge2018), while sidelining working-class claims for a dignified social existence with a modicum of economic equality and social recognition of all.

Third proposition, the party system cartelization hypothesis: In order to defend their own political survival and bargaining leverage, social democratic center-left parties have closed ranks with center-right mainstream parties. In light of the external constraints of globalization, they agree on broad lines of economic and social policy and engage merely in valence competition about which party most competently enacts such policies. In order to prevent new political entrepreneurs from attracting dissenters from the status quo in general elections, all of the mainstream parties agree on arrangements – particularly through public party finance benefiting the existing parties or access to mass media – to raise the thresholds of expenses and effort new partisan challengers must overcome to appeal to voters effectively. Mainstream parties constitute “cartels” that close off competition, but thereby exacerbating popular dissent and dissatisfaction with the “mainstream” political alternatives (Katz and Mair Reference Katz and Mair1995, Reference Katz and Mair2009, Reference Katz and Mair2018; Blyth and Katz Reference Blyth and Katz2005; Mair Reference Mair2013).

Fourth proposition, social democratic parties’ acquiescence to a capitalist liberal market status quo has alienated a disaffected working class: Disappointment with the centrist strategy of the organized political Left buying into the market liberalization of capitalist economies has led core working-class constituencies either to abstain massively, or to support radical leftist competitors to Social Democracy (Arndt Reference Arndt2013). Alternatively, the alienated working-class voters even abandoned the Left altogether, switching toward anti-immigrant, xenophobic, and nationalist populist parties of the extreme Right. The social democratic Left reneging on its traditional promises has thereby opened the door to a fundamental right-wing populist threat to democracy in general (Berman and Snegovaya Reference Berman and Snegovaya2019). High electoral volatility, decline of electoral participation, and collapsing party membership, especially among the younger age cohorts, are seen as signals of a widespread disaffection with current democratic politics.

We can now evaluate these hypotheses in light of the evidence our volume has examined by working backwards, starting with the behavioral implications regarding voter behavior and voter flows. Over the course of the past generation, if the class theoretic perspective were correct, the voter flow out of social democratic party constituencies should have overwhelmingly benefited radical leftist parties, particularly among workers and especially when these social democratic parties adopted moderate strategies. Social Democrats should perform electorally better by reasserting their leftist stance, and the leftist field would have had more leverage to influence the political economy with such a leftist stance.

With regard to voter flows, however, the chapters of the first part of our study document that Social Democrats have lost voters in all directions of programmatic-ideological alternatives. First, a great deal of vote switching took place among old-fashioned mainstream parties, with voters switching to moderate right parties, which is entirely at odds with the fourth proposition of the class-analytical framework. Second, the numerically most severe losses Social Democrats suffered went to green and left-libertarian parties that compete less on redistributive economic and social politics, where they sometimes tend to take more moderate stances than even centrist Social Democracy. Instead, these parties emphasize second dimension issue positions on libertarian political and social governance (civil liberties, participation, and gender relations) and multiculturalism (immigration, affirmative action, and cultural representation). Also, it is only a small share of social democratic electoral losses that benefit the electoral fortunes of far left competitors. Moreover, the losses of social democratic parties did by no means concentrate predominantly among working-class voters. Rather losses occurred most strongly among more highly educated strata of voters. Some working-class voters indeed defect to radical left parties, but even those parties attract stronger influx from sociocultural professionals. The class-theoretical perspective has nothing to say about the rise of these green left parties that have eaten into social democratic support.

Finally, few voters of the Left, including working-class voters, abandon Social Democracy in favor of radical right parties. Radical right voters are mostly recruited from center-right parties and from the pool of nonvoters. This also includes mostly workers who have never voted for parties of the Left in the first place. Radical right parties do attract greater proportions of working class and other lower income, less educated voters, when compared to the proportion of educated and more affluent voters within their electorates. But this does not imply that these working-class and lower-income voters originated from or ever were available to left parties. Many are low-income, less educated voters who never got a chance to obtain working-class jobs, particularly among the younger cohorts, and more specifically here among men who constitute an increasing share of low-education adults.

The main problem of Social Democracy with working-class voters, then, is different from what the class analytic narrative asserts. For one thing, the proportion of working-class voters – or more generally voters with low education and low income – is numerically and proportionally shrinking, particularly so among younger voters. In a very long-run structural perspective, there is only a subdued electoral future, therefore, in a Social Democracy primarily pinning its hopes on such voters. For another thing, many of these younger poorer voters have never been socialized into “typical” working-class occupations. They contribute to the new and – depending on political economic institutions – numerically substantial category of outsiders on the periphery of labor markets, often only intermittently employed mostly in low-skill personal service sector jobs (Emmenegger et al. Reference Emmenegger, Häusermann, Palier and Seeleib-Kaiser2012). They are an electorally under-represented category of citizens (if they have voting rights at all), and they reveal the increasing economic inequality characteristic of many advanced knowledge societies, but they are hard to mobilize with conventional social democratic templates, as their needs and demands are not shared by broad social strata, and as new issues have come to dominate the political agendas. In short, there is not a vast mass of precarious, “poor” citizens out there to which Social Democrats could appeal. There is a highly stratified and segmented occupational structure in which the poorest groups are a minority. There is a broad group of middle-income, intermediate-skill citizens in society, working in private enterprise or in nonprofit institutions and civil service administrations, who are captured neither by categorization as the declining working class nor by that of academically higher-grade certified professionals. In terms of the Oesch occupational class scheme (2006), they would qualify as members of the strongly expanding classes of sociocultural semiprofessionals, associate managers, or technicians. They overall share the preference profile of the professional/managerial classes, but somewhat more moderately: They support social protection and economic redistribution, as well as moderate dosages of many of the objectives left green parties advocate. But they cannot be persuaded by politicians who appeal to outlier groups and activists. As the analysis of several chapters has shown, an appeal to these groups will not make Social Democracy spectacularly successful in electoral terms again. But these voters most likely cannot be wooed to join a radical left or radical green left strategy either.

Based on the observable voter flows surrounding Social Democracy, it is not surprising that a radical left strategy has paid off not particularly well for social democratic parties, although movements to the left have not always electorally hurt them, particularly if social democratic parties are comparatively small already in the 1980s and can successfully contain the rise of parties of the Green Left and Radical Left by drawing close to these competitors’ positions. It is also unsurprising that distinctive radical left parties, competing with reformist, centrist Third Way Social Democrats, have not rallied a great deal of electoral support, and certainly not among the working class, particularly in the most advanced knowledge societies of Northwestern Europe with formerly powerful social democratic parties. Let us briefly review that record.

In electoral systems of proportional representation, where new party entry is associated with rather low costs and thresholds of legislative representation, radical left parties have achieved respectable rates of electoral success in Scandinavia (running under labels such as Left Socialists, Socialist People’s, Left, or Left Alliance parties since the early 1960s), the Netherlands (Socialist Party), and Germany (The Left). They and their likes have sometimes benefited from Social Democrats’ turn to the center, but they have never managed to exceed a modest ceiling of electoral support well under one-sixth of the total vote. In other countries, such as Austria, Belgium, and Switzerland, radical left parties could never even evolve beyond the status of small splinter parties. So, while there is a substantial hard leftist constituency for a more radical socialist economic agenda, it clearly resonates with only a limited, specialized audience unlikely to dominate the entire left political field. And even then, starting already in the 1970s, most of these radical left parties “modernized” their appeal by emphasizing libertarian positions on second dimension issues of political and cultural governance and social identities, clearly going beyond their staple economic leftism and eventually appealing mostly to nonworking-class constituencies, particularly voters of the educated middle class in middle- or high-skilled cognitive and interpersonal nonroutine jobs.

If the class theoretic argument were correct, radical left parties should substantially gain votes by denouncing Social Democrats’ centrism, particularly after left coalition governments from which the far left parties then walked away in protest against social democratic neoliberal moderation. But there seems to be no single empirical observation to confirm that pattern. In Denmark, for example, the Socialist People’s Party lost heavily in 2011, after denouncing the centrism of its previous social democratic partner. And in Sweden, in the 1998 election, the Left Party won votes from its then centrist social democratic coalition partner, but while sticking to the alliance and thereby tacitly tolerating the coalition’s centrism.Footnote ¹ In Greece, finally, it was a new radical leftist party government, Syriza, elected in 2015 that eventually caved in to Northern European demands to solve Greece’s economic crisis through financial austerity policies. But the effort to field a new leftist alternative to displace Syriza in the 2019 legislative election, spearheaded by the party’s former Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, got electorally nowhere (3.4% of the vote), and Syriza actually lot most support to its moderate right-wing competitor.Footnote ²

Next, let us consider how radical leftism plays out in party systems operating within first-past-the-post single-member district systems with plurality ballot. Here left activists face extremely unfavorable odds in overcoming thresholds of representation for a new party. Given low probabilities of new party success, radical activists can hope to impact left strategy by working through the organization of the hegemonic moderate left party, such as the British Labour Party. Radicals constitute distinctive intraparty factions in order to capture their entire party eventually and impose a radical socialist strategy. This is what the left socialist factions inside the British Labour Party successfully practiced in the early 1980s, making Michael Foote their party leader and prime ministerial candidate (1980–83), and again in the 2010s catapulting Jeremy Corbyn (2015–20) into the leadership position. In both instances, in national legislative elections, the radical strategy and leadership ultimately yielded defeats in which actually both working-class and nonworking-class voters abandoned the party, albeit at differential rates.Footnote ³

Finally, there is France with an electoral system that induces mixed incentives for radical left-party differentiation or pooling of left voters under a single-party umbrella. On the one hand, its single-member electoral districts encourage consolidation around single parties in a left and a right camp. On the other, its two-round run-off majoritarian electoral formula facilitates party system fragmentation in the first round and loose coalitions of parties in the run-off round. Here mainstream Socialists can afford to make more radical appeals in the first round, while simultaneously more radical left and more centrist parties within the left field advance their own distinctive pitches. Until 2012, this configuration of electoral system enabled Socialists to furnish one of two candidates in the second-round run-off presidential elections, except in the 2002 election, or the run-offs in individual districts in legislative elections. Since then, however, the postindustrial societal differentiation of political preferences within both left and right partisan fields has enabled new political entrepreneurs to change the electoral game such that that the conventionally dominant two center-left and center-right mainstream parties have been displaced by a much more complicated and polarized landscape of competitors. But this does not imply that a powerful radical Left would substitute for an exhausted, fragmented, and demobilized center Left. In the legislative election of 2022, the coalition of radical left and green left parties, augmented by fragments of the old socialist party, NUPES (Nouvelle Union Populaire Écologique et Sociale), garnered a touch over 25% of the vote in the first electoral round. Public commentators perceived this as a great success of the French Left, but the electoral alliance’s performance produced only a minor improvement over the combined electoral tally of its constituent parties in the preceding 2017 election. More importantly, it delivered worse results than the old mainstream Socialist Party and its left field allies achieved in every single legislative election between 1981 and 2012.

To summarize, the empirical implications of the industrial capitalism class-centered theory for social democratic electoral success in the twenty-first century, stated earlier in postulate 4, namely, a strategy of left radicalism appealing to a working class – or generically poor, less educated – vote constituency, are not borne out by data on voter movements and relative party strengths. As indicated in this volume, green and left-libertarian or moderate strategies appear to be electorally more promising. Social democratic strategy has to recognize the complexity of socioeconomic challenges in knowledge society and consequently the divisions among voter groups broadly sympathetic to the social democratic idea. Moreover, electoral success depends on the configuration of competitors within and beyond the social democratic field. Social democratic strategies that may be best for the individual parties’ electoral success do not always turn out also to advance the social democratic field, when there is a differentiation of the partisan options with the field.

If the class analytical approach fails to characterize the landscape of political competition in knowledge society, this generates the suspicion that there may be flaws in the empirical validity of the underlying fundamental propositions that generate the factually inaccurate claims about voter movements in and out of social democracy and conditions of social democratic electoral success. These underlying political-economic and institutional arguments are not the direct object of investigation in our volume. But let us briefly identify where we suspect some problems are buried with the class-centered framework.

The class-theoretic perspective suggests that social democratic parties have joined a “cartel” of the mainstream parties (proposition 3) in order to ensure electoral support, despite abandoning the interests of their working-class core constituencies (proposition 2). As discussed a generation ago (Koole Reference Koole1996; Kitschelt Reference Kitschelt2000), there is no theory of how such cartel could provide incentives for politicians not to defect and no evidence of a cartel among parties, understood in the technical sense of preventing entry of competition, regulation of supply, and price fixing. The mechanism is supposed to be public party financing, rendering entry of new parties more difficult. In practice, however, public party financing has encouraged entry in the countries with most generous funding. Realizing the proliferation of electorally attractive new “challenger” parties in systems said to be cartelized by public party finance, cartel theorists (Katz and Mair Reference Katz and Mair2009, Reference Katz and Mair2018; Mair Reference Mair2013) then argued that it was precisely such cartels that incited enough voter outrage to promote the electoral fortunes of radical left and right-wing populist alternatives. But the theory cannot have it both ways. Either it predicts that cartels restrict competition, and that politicians achieve it with cartelization. Or the theory predicts that cartelization produces more fragmentation, but why didn’t politicians in mainstream parties then stay away from it or quickly corrected their error? The cartel theory appears to assume an extreme myopia among mainstream politicians that is hard to fathom.

Discrepancies between salient voter preferences on an issue and available party positions can be explained more consistently and straightforwardly than by cartel party theory. To adopt a new position, parties need to calculate their electoral trade-offs and issue yields (DeSio and Weber 2014). Established parties might find that responding to an issue position may boost their short-run support, but with negative longer-run electoral consequences. Or parties may find that serving a new issue position will yield a negative electoral issue yield, as the party’s attractiveness to new voters embracing that position will be more than offset by internal divisions among existing supporters and defection of previous loyalists. Both considerations can lead to apparent gaps in responsiveness but do not require any reference to a cartelization claim.

Beyond the theoretical difficulties of the cartel theory, the existing empirical evidence quite consistently shows that whichever direction party competition has taken, the programmatic appeals of political parties are still broadly congruent with those of their voters. If anything, it is the radical parties of the Left and Right whose appeals appear to diverge from their more moderate electoral followings (see Hagevi et al. Reference Hagevi, Blombäck, Demker, Hinnfors and Loxbo2022: 146). Likewise, it is not true that mainstream politicians can conjure up this programmatic congruence of preferences simply because public opinion is endogenous to elite appeals. There is a complex intertemporal back and forth between elite position taking and mass public opinion change (Hagevi et al. Reference Hagevi, Blombäck, Demker, Hinnfors and Loxbo2022: 151–8) and there is considerable evidence that often public opinion is in the lead of party appeals (Barbera et al. 2019). It is not, as suggested by Achen and Bartels (Reference Achen and Bartels2016), that parties announce their programmatic position, and voters, then, simply adopt whatever their elites tell them to do, blindly following their affective partisan identification. At least on salient issues voters may consciously abandon a party, when it announces certain positions that diverge from voters’ preferences (Carsey and Layman Reference Carsey and Layman2006; Goren and Chapp Reference Goren and Chapp2017; Evans and Neundorf Reference Evans and Neundorf2020).

These dynamic accountability mechanisms are also in full display in evidence reported in this volume. Voters switch in substantively consistent ways to parties that are close to their personal preference schedules. Social Democrats have difficulties keeping their voters, as they depart in different ideological-programmatic directions: Pleasing one group of dissatisfied supporters may only further antagonize another.

Empirical evidence also defies the claim that social democratic parties have simply converged with the moderate right, thereby abandoning their electoral constituency’s preferences (proposition 2). In some countries, on some dimensions, a modicum of convergence has taken place. In others, on some policy dimensions, greater divergence, if not polarization, has prevailed in the configuration of parties (see most recently: Hagevi et al. Reference Hagevi, Blombäck, Demker, Hinnfors and Loxbo2022: chapters 4–7). Even if, by some measures (cf. Boix Reference Boix2019: 145), Social Democrats on average shifted slightly toward the center in social and economic policies in the 1990s and 2000s, the appearance of convergence often resulted from a shift of both center-left and center-right mainstream party camps toward that center, not simply just Social Democrats moving (Boix Reference Boix2019; Gingrich and Häusermann Reference Gingrich and Häusermann2015). Hence, the observation of a mild right-shift of social democratic parties in the 1990s needs to be complemented by the observation of a relative left-shift of center-right parties, rather than an overall neoliberal reversal on both sides.

Finally, there is little evidence that governing parties, and particularly Social Democrats, abandon their programmatic pledges, once in office and thereby ignore their voters’ preferences. Parties actually do realize many, and often most, of their preelection pledges.Footnote ⁴ The best placed pledges are those catering to preferences of large blocks of voters in the middle of the electoral preference distributions whose support is needed to capture the median voter area and enable parties to sustain government majorities. As a consequence, a “middle class” will always be better represented and exercise greater leverage over policy than extremely poor voters (Elkjaer and Iversen Reference Elkjaer and Iversen2020, Reference Elkjaer and Iversen2023).

To provide a stark example of Social Democracy’s electoral responsiveness to lower and middle strata voters, let us take the posterchild of the class analytical critique, the British Labour Party under Tony Blair charting a “Third Way” political strategy. Ironically, that party and that leader did more to expand the British welfare state than any other UK government since World War II. In real inflation-adjusted terms, upon ascent to office in 1997, this party increased public budget expenditure on pensions, health care, and education from about 280 billion GBP in 1997–98 to more than 480 billion GBP in the last fiscal year of the Labour administration 2010–11 (UK Government. HM Treasury 2022). This expansion amounts to an annual real increase of more than 4% in each and every year of Labour in office, a faster expansion than in any previous Labour governing spell in Britain, including the 1946–51 period, and a record rarely matched by social democratic governments anywhere in the Golden Era of postwar economic growth. This does not mean, however, that the Labour Party served Britain’s poorest and most marginalized constituents, as demonstrated by its workfare policy, its aversion to increasing unemployment benefits, means-tested income support and income tax progressivity, as well as its resistance to undoing many of the preceding Conservative governments’ benefits reductions. The party also liberalized the public sector by infusing elements of competition into government services and by contracting out tasks to private business. Thus, Labour’s Third Way strategy can also be accounted for by a blunt calculus of electoral accountability, catering to the vast mass from lower to upper middle-income voters much more so than to the very poor, as objectionable as this strategy might appear from a perspective of radical social equalization.

To explain why social democratic parties’ agenda of social and economic policies have changed over time, we also need to focus on the entirely new twenty-first century knowledge capitalism challenges that interact and conflict with one another and compete for resources and attention among political constituencies broadly sympathetic to the basic social democratic idea. We have repeatedly shown throughout this study how different old and new socioeconomic groups populate the broadly social democratic field. They are heterogeneous in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, education, income, skill type, and employment sector (public or private, export-oriented or domestic) to mention only the most important ones, and they react differently to the challenges of skill-biased technological progress, the demographic transition, the changing role of family units, and the exigencies of ecology and climate threats. These groups have different needs and different relative priorities when it comes to public pensions, health care, family support, education and professional training, gender equality, equalization and recognition of ethnocultural claims, and environmental protection. That is a key reason why the social democratic field yields a proliferation of multiple parties, whenever electoral institutions permit it, and the complexity of these programmatic trade-offs for the left cannot be reduced to Social Democrats acquiescing to the globalization of capital markets and letting the democratic class compromise of the post–World War II era fall by the wayside. Social Democrats never walked away from that compromise, but the compromise has been tested and rendered incomplete and insufficient by these new challenges. Welfare states have not meaningfully shrunk anywhere in advanced capitalist economies. The reality of the situation is that in most countries, social expenditures are hovering near historically high ceilings, but that demand is expanding and differentiating – for pensions, health care, education, family support, eldercare, or retraining.Footnote ⁵ Even when party governments, including Social Democratic governments, have cut back individual entitlements, gross expenditures – particularly for pensions and health care – have continued to increase. In this context, social democratic parties are coping to deal with new challenges and old commitments, and there are different agendas within the social democratic field.

In sum, the class-theoretic perspective largely ignores the multidimensional and complex societal challenges that are experienced by the vast mass of twenty-first century inhabitants of knowledge capitalist society, and which cannot be captured by simple wage earner/business class divisions alone or even primarily. In the welfare state literature, the emergence of new dimensions of social risk and demand, which deviate from the traditional redistributive logic, have been theorized under the label of “new social risks” (e.g., Bonoli Reference Bonoli2005; Bonoli and Natali Reference Bonoli and Natali2012; see related Rehm Reference Rehm2016; Iversen and Rehm Reference Iversen and Rehm2022). Building on and expanding this idea, the new risks and challenges that weigh on citizens in the early twenty-first century are multifaceted and multidimensional in ways that transcend the realm of social policy. Relevant issues for wide shares of the society – well beyond the lower income strata – encompass questions such as: Can I afford to enable my children to acquire the skills that will ensure them to earn a decent living throughout their adulthood? Will I myself continue to have skills that provide me with predictable market income? What does addressing these challenges mean for my social and my family life, my gender, and intergenerational relations? Will I be able to afford to retire with a decent pension when I will approach old age, despite spells of atypical employment or employment interruptions for care or education? Beyond social welfare, people ask: Will I be able to extend my life expectancy by relying on all the critical improvements in health care that are becoming technologically available but that are extremely costly because of high labor and capital inputs? Will I and my children be safe and accepted socially despite deviating from majority social norms? Will my quality of life deteriorate due to global warming and the loss of biodiversity under way, and what sacrifices are in order to prevent these consequences?

These are all questions that generate high levels of anxiety and stress across much of the electorate in knowledge societies. Political parties and politicians – social democratic parties and all others – are grappling with responses to these novel questions, and they come up with different answers, contingent upon the constituencies they are dealing with, or have not found any answers at all. This situation contributes to a fragmentation and reconfiguration of the partisan electorate not satisfactorily captured by the class theoretic perspective.