Electoral Realignment and the Position of Social Democratic Parties on Welfare Policies

Sociostructural change has led to profound shifts in the composition of party constituencies. The most striking electoral realignment consists in specific parts of the middle class becoming the paramount electoral basis for Social Democracy. However, most of the literature neglects this fundamental electoral transformation. In this paper, I start by tracing the electoral realignment of social democratic voter constituencies in cross-national comparison since the mid 1970s. I then analyze the relationship between voter realignment and the policy preferences of social democratic parties in Europe on the basis of manifesto data, which allow for a longitudinal analysis of constituencies as determinants of policy positions. On the basis of a newly compiled data set on party positions during electoral campaigns in the 2000s, the third part of the analysis explores the implications of electoral realignment for alliance potentials in welfare reforms, by looking at family and labor market politics in six countries strongly affected by electoral realignment.

I find that the shift to middle class electoral constituencies among social democratic parties is related to a shift in their position towards an increased support for social investment (education). However, it does not generally correlate with a withdrawal from traditional social policy issues (redistribution). Rather, social democratic parties’ positions on redistributive social policy depend on the extent of competition for working class votes: in countries with a strong right-wing populist competitor), social democratic parties have remained more strongly pro-redistribution than in countries with a centripetal dynamic of party competition