Losing the Middle Ground
- Author(s)
- Tarik Abou-Chadi, Markus Wagner
- Abstract
Two widespread narratives attempt to account for the decline of social democratic parties over the past decades. The economic narrative points to these parties' centrist positioning as the key cause and the Radical Left and Right as the key beneficiaries. By contrast, the cultural narrative focuses on the liberal positions of social democratic parties on new issues relating to cultural issues such as immigration, gender equality, and European integration and points to the Radical Right as key beneficiaries. What links these two narratives is the idea that Social Democrats have alienated the working class. In this chapter, we use individual-level survey data from eight countries to show that although social democratic parties have seen losses among all electoral groups, the voters who left social democratic parties were disproportionately centrist and educated. Second, we find that only a small share of former social democratic voters defected directly to parties of the Radical Right. Instead, social democratic parties lost most voters to moderate right, green, and left-libertarian parties. We additionally show that cultural attitudes play only a small role for choosing between moderate right and social democratic parties. By contrast, they are strongly linked to choices between social democratic and green/left-libertarian parties. These findings cast doubt on both predominant narratives of social democratic decline.
- Organisation(s)
- Department of Government
- External organisation(s)
- Nuffield College, University Of Oxford
- Pages
- 102-119
- No. of pages
- 18
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009496810.004
- Publication date
- 01-2024
- Peer reviewed
- Yes
- Austrian Fields of Science 2012
- 506014 Comparative politics
- Keywords
- ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Social Sciences
- Sustainable Development Goals
- SDG 5 - Gender Equality, SDG 10 - Reduced Inequalities
- Portal url
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/cef343eb-c50d-435d-9810-9ad09ebde2d4