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The fourth stage of social democracy

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Abstract

This article examines the political crisis of social-democratic parties in Western Europe in light of its impact on the social-democratic emancipatory project, and asks whether the first calls the second into question. It begins by defining social democracy as an emancipatory project, and identifies three major historical phases that correspond to three distinct conceptions of the project. “Social-democratic dilemmas” section examines recent literature in comparative welfare state economics, political sociology, and studies of populism and authoritarianism, to show how the socio-economic transformations of the last five decades have enlarged and fragmented the constituency of social-democratic parties, and contends that this situation has generated powerful tensions between the normative and the mundane dimensions of the social-democratic project. Three major dilemmas—economic, cultural, and political—leading to three deep conflicts internal to the social-democratic constituency are identified and discussed. Combining these empirical findings with the three rival interpretations of the social-democratic project introduced in “Social democracy as an ideational and a mundane project” section, “Three scenarios” section develops three possible scenarios for the evolution of this project in the near future: decline, drift, and renewal. “Implications for policy and politics” section assesses the likelihood and political meaning of each scenario for the pursuit of the social-democratic project, taking into consideration the recent upsurge of left-wing populism.

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Notes

  1. Standard accounts include Streeck (2014); Crouch (2004); Wallerstein et al. (2013), and more recently, Berman and Snegovaya (2019) and Mudge (2018).

  2. Two recent and paradigmatic examples are Mudge (2018) and Berman and Snegovaya (2019).

  3. See, for example, Honneth (2015) and Cohen (2009).

  4. See, for example, Sassoon (2010); Berman (2006); Wallerstein (2003); Moschonas (2002); Eley (2002); Bartolini (2000); and Merkel et al. (2008).

  5. In a similar vein, Habermas calls it “social democratic reformism” (Habermas 1989), and Geoff Eley speaks of social democracy: “as the distinctive socialist ideal of democracy” (Eley 2002, p. 20). I have provided my own account of this wide view of democracy in Frega 2019.

  6. Among others, Sassoon (2010) and Berman (2006) adopt this chronology.

  7. In an extremely vast literature on the anti-authoritarian meaning of these movements and their disconnection from mainstream left-wing politics, see Eley (2002); Sassoon (2010); and Polletta (2012).

  8. “Utopian socialism proved a moment of exceptional radicalism on the gender front, which remained unrecuperated until the late twentieth century” (Eley 2002, p. 30). As (Audier 2017) has recently shown, the same holds for environmentalism.

  9. Paradigmatic accounts include Crouch (2004) and Streeck (2014). For a recent statement and a broad historical account, see Mudge (2018).

  10. Economic redistribution through the welfare state has, indeed, been also largely supported by conservative and Christian-democratic parties, and it is today openly supported by right-wing populist parties.

  11. See Evans (2017); Przeworski (1986), and Häusermann (2010).

  12. The salience of these three dilemmas varies across countries, as literature on welfare democracies has begun to show. For empirical data in comparative perspective, see Manow et al. (2018) and Beramendi et al. (2015). We should also bear in mind that these dilemmas do not coincide with the concrete challenges faced by its mundane counterpart, since parties have also to deal with contingent constraints that may have no direct relation to the ideational core, such as technological change, demographic cycles, fluctuations in the economy, exogenous shocks, and party structure and dynamics.

  13. There are exceptions, however. Kitschelt and Rehm (2014) differentiate the authoritarian dimension from the economic and the cultural, although the “greed, grid, group” model does not exactly overlap with mine. Another threefold classificatory model that overlaps to a degree with mine is that developed by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (Norris and Inglehart 2019), who propose to position parties into a three-dimensional space defined by three axes: left-right; libertarian-authoritarian, and populist-pluralist.

  14. See Cowie (2010), Häusermann (2010), and Sassoon (2010) for empirical evidence and Rueda (2007) for theoretical modelling.

  15. Bornschier (2010) and Kriesi et al. (2008) establish a causal correlation between occupational and educational level on the one hand and cultural positioning on the other. Occupation and education are taken to be a reliable proxy of social class. For theoretical explanations and empirical evidence of the disproportionate representation of working class members in extreme right parties, see Rydgren (2012); Mayer (2014), and Spies (2013).

  16. For empirical evidence in the US and UK, see Gest (2016), Hochschild (2016), and Coe (2018) for a vivid literary rendering of the same ideas.

  17. This has been the case of Syriza in its first phase, of Corbyin’s Labour during the Brexit campaign, and of La France Insoumise and Movimento Cinque Stelle in a more continuous and sustained way. I come back to the implications of this trend for the social-democratic project in the next section.

  18. Classical references include Lipset (1959); Shils (1954), and Ray (1974). For a more recent appraisal of this phenomenon, see Federico et al. (2017); De Regt et al. (2011); Marx and Schumacher (2018); Lefkofridi et al. (2014); Flanagan and Lee (2003); and Thomassen (2012).

  19. Left-authoritarians: “are citizens who blend left-wing economic with traditional/authoritarian socio-cultural views” (Lefkofridi et al. 2014, 66). See also De Regt et al. (2011); Federico et al. (2017); Marx and Schumacher (2018); and Stenner (2005).

  20. For example, it is estimated that they constituted a significant share of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton supporters during the last two presidential campaigns (Hetherington and Weiler 2009, p. 6).

  21. See Norris and Inglehart (2019) and Judis (2016) for an account of populism as a logic of political action with redemptive overtones, as opposed to the reformist and “reasonable” way of proceeding typical of social-democratic political parties. See Cohen (2019); Frega (2020); de la Torre (2019) for a discussion of the theoretical incompatibilities between social-democracy and left-wing populism.

  22. See Crouch (2004); Streeck (2014); Lavelle (2008; and Bartolini (2000).

  23. See Berman and Snegovaya (2019) and Mudge (2018).

  24. This was already the idea behind Nancy Fraser’s call for a return from recognition-based to redistribution-based policies (Fraser and Honneth 2003). But see Fraser (2013) for a partial revision. See also Mouffe (2005) for defense of the primacy of the economic dimension. For an early and prescient criticism, see Habermas (1989). See Crouch (2018) for a later re-appraisal.

  25. For empirical evidence, see Manow et al. (2018) and Judis (2016).

  26. See, for example, Bornschier and Kriesi 2012 which explicitly quote anti-universalism and, to a lesser extent, distrust of democracy as the most important factors to explain right-wing vote among members of the working class. With reference to the US and UK, Gest 2016 contends that the best predictors of working class vote for extreme-right parties are social and political, and not economic, deprivation.

  27. I discuss this alternative at greater length in Frega 2020.

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Acknowledgments

For helpful comments, I would like to thank Simon Bornschier, Silja Häusermann, Wolfgang Merkel, Thamy Pogrebinschi, Matteo Santarelli, the participants to the workshop “L’età dei populismi” (Pisa, 28-29th May 2019), and to the International Conference “Ways forward for Democracy (Munich, 24-26th July 2019), as well as the Theory and Society Editors and reviewers.

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  1. Centre Marc Bloch, Centre de recherche en sciences sociales de Berlin, USR3130 - UMIFRE 14 (CNRS- MAEE), Friedrichstrasse 191, D-10117, Berlin, Germany

    Roberto Frega

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Frega, R. The fourth stage of social democracy. Theor Soc 50, 489–513 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-020-09424-y

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