Losing the Middle Ground

Autor(en)

Tarik Abou-Chadi, Markus Wagner

Abstrakt

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(en)

Institut für Staatswissenschaft

Externe Organisation(en)

Nuffield College, University Of Oxford

Seiten

102-119

Anzahl der Seiten

18

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009496810.004

Publikationsdatum

01-2024

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

506014 Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Allgemeine Sozialwissenschaften

Sustainable Development Goals

SDG 5 – Geschlechtergleichheit, SDG 10 – Weniger Ungleichheiten

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/cef343eb-c50d-435d-9810-9ad09ebde2d4