The late Brian Farrell once described the Labour Party as a ‘curious combination of weakness and persistence’ in that it was never particularly strong but it never declined so far as to be irrelevant. 110 years after its foundation the Labour Party is certainly no stronger but there now seems to be an acknowledgement that its persistence is also in doubt.

This is evident from the urgency applied to the replacement of Alan Kelly as leader of the Labour Party. Political leaders are typically replaced either due to a poor election result or a decline in the opinion polls in conjunction with a popular alternative leader. While Ivana Bacik is undoubtedly a popular alternative as evidenced by her stunning by-election victory, the evidence against Kelly is a little flimsy. His personal approval rating was higher than leaders of similar sized parties and it was quite uncertain how Labour would fare in the next election given the increased role of election campaigns in electoral outcomes not just here with Sinn Féin but also in Germany for example where two months before the election Olaf Scholz’s SPD languished a distant third before winning the election outright.

That said, the Labour Party is rightly anxious about its support levels. But this is not a problem merely confined to the Labour Party, rather even the combined support for Labour and the Social Democrats of 7.3% at the last election is worrisome for those concerned about the future of social democracy.

Broader relevance

It is true that politics isn’t solely about support levels for individual political parties as most policy happens in between elections. A unique feature of Irish politics is the relatively poor electoral support for social democratic parties. While these parties enjoyed support of in excess of 30% for much of the post-war period across Europe, in Ireland the Labour Party remained a minor political party averaging 11 per cent of the vote.

And yet, even as a minor party, the Labour Party has been able to bend the party system to its will. While Ireland is the only European country that hasn’t had a left-led government, the impact of the left is quite evident even today as Ireland has (after Luxembourg), the second highest minimum wage in Europe and it has the most redistributive taxation system. The Labour Party has also exerted considerable pressure in terms of social change, particularly in the last 40 years in relation to contraception, equal pay, divorce, same-sex marriage and abortion.

While as a minor party Labour had an oversized influence on public policy, as micro parties Labour and Social Democracy are in danger of becoming irrelevant. So for the Labour party at least Ivana Bacik’s leadership must be a successful one.

A question of strategy

So how do social democrats increase their support to become relevant and influential again? The question we’ll address here is whether they should tack towards the centre, or towards the left.

This is something that was considered to be a settled argument in the 1990s with the success of the ‘third way’ or ‘neue mitte’ (new middle) platform adopted by social democrats across Europe in the 1990s. Prompted by the ramifications of interventionism in the late 1970s this centrist re-positioning emphasised regulation of capitalism rather than an outright rejection of it. It was very successful from an electoral perspective, so much so that by 1998 centre-left parties were in government in the United States, Canada and every Western European country except Ireland, Spain and Norway.

However, there are three issues with this strategy.

Firstly, as the Labour Party’s history indicates electoral power isn’t the only way of influencing policy objectives. There is a trade-off in relation to how much a political party wants to give up in order to achieve electoral power and opposition parties and minor coalition partners can and do influence the political agenda. Considerable evidence such as that of Seeberg (2018) reveals social problems do not systematically influence voters’ evaluations of government competence unless opposition criticism is taken into account.

One example of this is that in response to the Labour Party’s left-wing surge under Jeremy Corbyn, the 2017 Conservative Party manifesto UK general election was the most left-wing Conservative manifesto in over 50 years according to the Comparative Manifesto Project, more left-wing according to the CMP than each of the three manifestos the Labour Party won government with in 1997, 2002 and 2005.

Secondly, academic evidence has shown that optimal positioning centre-left political parties is dependent on the electoral system of the country and more specifically how many political parties can viably compete. Some electoral systems encourage more political parties than others. For example, in the UK, Australia and the US just one person is elected per constituency. This means that for a party to get elected it needs to win a very high vote share and therefore these electoral systems tend to have fewer parties. In these systems social democrats have benefitted from tacking towards the centre as they only face muted threats from smaller parties. One tactic employed by social democrats in these elections is something called ‘squeeze messaging’ where it is made clear to supporters of smaller parties such as the Green Party that they will ‘waste their vote’ if they do not vote for the Labour Party.

Other electoral systems tend to elect more people in a given constituency. For example, in Ireland we elect between 3 and 5 TDs in a constituency and the Netherlands operates as if it were one single large constituency electing 150 MPs. These systems tend to be more open to larger numbers of political parties. In these systems social democrats that tacked towards the centre have been outflanked by the emergence of newer parties to their left. For example, in the Netherlands where the Labour Party’s move towards the centre saw it outflanked on the left by the Socialist Party and GroenLinks without gaining support in the centre from Democracy 66. In Ireland, The Labour Party has been outflanked by the Social Democrats, People Before Profit, various independents, Greens and of course Sinn Féin.

This dynamic has been exacerbated as result of the trend towards greater fragmentation in party politics.

The third and final reason why this tactic is limited is because the world has simply changed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Following that crisis centre-left parties retreated to their lowest vote shares right across Europe in a process known as the ‘Pasokification’, after the social democratic party that dominated Greece from 1981 until 2009 averaging 42% of the vote, but dropping to 5% by 2015 in response to its implementation of strict conditions imposed on Greece as a result of the financial crisis. The Pasokification development is a reflection of how in the post-crisis period social democratic parties tended to fare much worse than any other party group. In a parallel with Ireland, and the contrasting fortunes of Fianna Fáil/Green Party and the Labour Party, the original architects of the financial crisis in Greece, the New Democracy Party, returned to government in 2019, while Pasok has struggled to recover.

Just as the economic crisis in the 1980s and the fall of the Berlin Wall influenced public policy in the 1990s, the financial crisis in the 2010s has influenced public policy and attitudes thereafter.  This is particularly noticeable among millennials who tend to be more skeptical of financial markets and capitalism more generally than the generations both older and younger than them. Similarly, the pandemic will invariably have an indelible effect on Generation Z.

Demographic change

Neither is it so simple that social democratic parties need to tilt towards the left. Those that look back towards the post-war composition of the social democrats are perhaps even more misguided than those that seek comfort in the Third Way. The coalition of public sector and industrial workers that helped social democrats to dominate in the post-war period is no longer viable for two reasons.

The first reason is that there has been a decline in the size of one of the main groups that have traditionally supported social democrats –working class industrial workers.

This is compounded by the decline in the number of state-owned enterprises. One of the principal determinants of social democrats before the emergence of the Third Way was a preference for state ownership of natural monopolies. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s this debate had a direct impact on their livelihood of postal workers, bank officials, miners, employees of gas and electricity companies, airline employees etc and that of their dependents. With a dramatic reduction in nationalised industries this particular argument has become less relevant and more of an ideological or theoretical debate. The decline of trade unions which provided much of the organisational, socio-structural and financing environment for social democrats is also related.

The second reason is that social democrats are less popular even among industrial workers, or more generally among working class voters. While class is still an important determinant of attitudes, as a concept, society is no longer composed to two homogenous working class and middle-class groups.

The uncertainty around class is reflected in a poll by YouGov in the UK which showed that 41 per cent of those that fall into the ABC1 social grade defined themselves as working class while 25 per cent of those that fall into the C2DE social grade defined themselves as middle class. Home ownership, income and education are in many systems primary drivers of voting behaviour and relate to many of the economic trade-offs that governments face. In Ireland, polling by Ireland Thinks shows that 37 per cent of those that identify as working class earn at least €30,000, 63 per cent own their own home and 22 per cent have a third level degree. While these figures are significantly lower than for those who identify as middle-class, they do muddy the preferences of this group of voters.

Furthermore and as industry has declined with few opportunities for younger people the age profile of those in traditional working class roles has generally increased. This leads us to some of the principle determinants of voting behaviour today.

In every generation as people grow older, their incentives tend to favour a more conservative disposition. Redistribution tends to favour those in younger demographic groups while inflation is a much greater concern for those in older demographics. In terms of social issues countless studies show that as we age we become less intellectually curious, less tolerant of ambiguity and more generally less tolerant of change in our environment. Indeed, this conservativism is even deemed to reduce stress among older voters. Voting behaviour across Europe persistently reflects these differences and as such, while mindful of the concerns of its older supporters it is critical to the survival of social democrats that they are able to reinvent themselves in order to appeal to each new generation.

Radical change

By seeking to cling to this older demographic, social democrats have often lost their innovative zeal. While social democrats have had great success at reshaping society, they are perhaps becoming victims of this success. The welfare state as we understand it today is the culmination of a series of social democratic policies: the state pension, minimum wage, maximum working hours, paid annual leave, collective bargaining, free education etc.

Yet as these policies have come to reflect the status quo, social democrats have increasingly become defenders of that status quo. They find themselves surrounded by parties on the left, radical right, greens and Christian democrats who all agree with these basic principles and as a result social democrats are perhaps the real centre of the political system. However, there is little to gain electorally from the centre ground.

The aforementioned fragmentation of party systems has had another impact. It has led to the inevitable fragmentation of coalition governments. This means that even if the party one votes for gets into government they are increasingly required to trade their policies off in a coalition negotiation process involving multiple political parties with often opposing positions. And this is before practical constraints posed by the civil service or indeed the inevitability that political events overtake the best laid budgetary plans. The upshot is that no matter who one votes for the outcomes are unresponsive to the election. In response to this, voters increasingly discount the pledges of parties and often vote for parties more extreme than their own viewpoint in order to effect change.

If we understand politics at its simplest level to reflect whether a given voter wants change or more-of-the-same then the social democrats occupy an unenviable position of defending the status quo, even when they are not in government.

Social democracy has however meant different things in different periods and in the period after the financial crisis and in response to an altered demographic profile of the electorate it should mean something new again.

To that end social democrats can learn from the radical zeal that brought them from minor parties to major parties in the pre-war period, when many liberals and conservatives feared that by empowering the masses, democracy would lead to what John Stuart Mill, for example, called ‘tyranny of the majority’.

Social Democrats need to continuously reflect this level of insurgency, to come up with new ideas. Just as the Schumpterian term ‘creative destruction’ describes the necessary replacement of old ideas with new ones in the field of economics, it is also true of politics.

Memories fade

There are some green shoots of recovery. In Spain and Portugal PSOE and the Socialist Party have both won the last two elections. In France the Socialist Party was the most popular party in the first round 31% in the 2021 regional elections. The SPD was the largest party in the 2021 federal elections, the party’s first in 20 years. In Italy Partito Democratico are in coalition and currently poll marginally ahead of its rivals. In Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Latvia, Bulgaria and Romania the Social Democrats are in government. In some cases the social democrats have adopted more commonly associated with the right. In particular the social democrats in Denmark under Mette Frederiksen have adopted Policies that are more restrictive of immigrants, while the Norwegian Social Democrats have adopted a Pro oil Platform.

One appropriate comparison for the Labour Party is the Liberal Democrats. They too were a minor coalition partner who oversaw much of the belt-tightening in the years immediately after the financial crisis. While support for the Liberal Democrats remains on par if not slightly below their showing at the last general election, the party has benefitted from two big wins in the Chesham & Amersham and North Shropshire by elections, in which support for the party increased by 30 per cent and 37 per cent respectively. In France, The Socialist Party won the French regional elections, with Les Republicain.

It remains to be seen what the most appropriate strategy is for the recovery of social democracy however there are plenty of opportunities to reflect the new generations in responding to the impact of the pandemic, of inflation, of automation, unregulated labour markets, weak regulation of financial markets, inequality, and chronic housing shortages. Issues that broadly align with a generation of younger voters that recent estimates suggest are the first expected to earn less than their parents. Such a strategy would be more in line with the values of the Labour party, social democracy and may yet be successful.