Losing the Middle Ground: The electoral decline of Social Democratic parties since 2000

This is a chapter from an edited volume, Beyond Social Democracy: The Transformation of the Left inEmerging Knowledge Societies, edited by Silja Häusermann and Herbert Kitschelt. 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. In contrast, the cultural narrative focuses of the liberal positions of social democratic parties on new issues relating to cultural issues such as immigration, gender equality and European integration, and paints 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 8 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. In contrast, they are strongly to choices between social democratic and green/left-libertarian parties. These findings cast doubt on both predominant narratives of social democratic decline.