Introduction

Abstract

Against the backdrop of renewed attention to the working-class vote in both the scientific community and the political sphere, the ambition of this book is to provide a careful examination of the relationship between social democracy and its working-class electorate. The introduction first presents the context and the goals of the study. It then explains the conditions required for a detailed and precise analysis of the class basis of social democracy and outlines the approach used throughout the book. It also reminds the reader of the origins of social democracy and the broad transformation and crisis in this party family. It finally presents the choice of the six social democratic/labour/socialist parties at the centre of this research.

Social Democratic Parties as Children of the Industrial Revolution

This book tells the story of transformations in the electorate for social democracy and of class conflict in electoral politics in Western Europe. The relationship between social democratic/socialist/labour parties¹ and their working-class electorates today no longer appears logical and straightforward. Something has been broken. For a long time, the defence of the working class constituted the raison d’être of social democratic parties. They emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century as children of the revolutionary processes of industrialisation and democratisation. They were closely linked to trade unions—the same individuals were often leading activists in both parties and unions. While trade unions, as the economic arm of the labour movement, defended workers’ interests in relation to the power of employers in factories, social democratic parties stood for workers’ demands in the political sphere. On the one hand, labour movement organisations were the product of increasing social tensions that emerged from the industrial revolution. On the other hand, they also decisively shaped workers’ class consciousness and contributed to them organising collectively (Moschonas 2002: 28–30; Sassoon 1996: 7–8). In no other continent has manufacturing employment been as dominant as in Europe (Therborn 1995). This unique configuration created specific linkages between parties and social classes and resulted in the importance of a class cleavage in European politics (Lipset and Rokkan 1967).

Nowadays, the fight for workers’ interests and the definition of the working class as the natural constituency of social democracy seems to belong more to history books than to reflect practices in contemporary politics. Declining support among workers, a declining number of politicians with a working-class background, difficult relationships with trade unions; all these signals point in the same direction of a massive transformation in social democracy in recent decades. In this context, it is emblematic that politicians and leaders from social democratic parties often have trouble in simply addressing the working class. An episode from the electoral campaign for the 2002 French Presidential election illustrates the new relationship between social democracy and its historical constituency well. ‘The word “worker” is not a dirty word,’² said the French socialist Pierre Mauroy—an important figure in the French Socialist Party who was Prime Minister from 1981 to 1984 under the Mitterrand Presidency. In this statement, Pierre Mauroy advised Lionel Jospin, the candidate for the French Socialist Party, to campaign more explicitly for workers’ interests—at a time where several industrial companies had announced massive restructuring—and criticised the absence of the word ‘worker’ from the PS election manifesto. This election was marked by a very low score for Lionel Jospin, which resulted in his exclusion from the second round. In contrast, the candidate for the National Front, Jean-Marie Le Pen, succeeded in qualifying for the second round. In his speech in the evening after the first round, Le Pen presented himself as the representative of the ‘little people, the nobodies, the excluded’ and the ‘miners, steelworkers and workers in all these industries ruined by the “Euro-mondialism” of Maastricht’ and called on them to keep their hopes and mobilise for the second round.³ Undeniably, it was a strategic attempt to exploit the lack of appeals to workers by the socialist candidate.

We are now almost twenty years after this election. However, this episode seems to be the prelude to many similar stories where on the one hand social democracy has trouble in mobilising the working-class vote, while on the other hand radical right or even mainstream right parties present themselves as the true representatives of the ‘people.’ Several earthquakes have happened in recent years. In the 2019 British general election, the Conservative candidate Boris Johnson won a large majority—reaching scores unprecedented since Margaret Thatcher—and managed to gain constituencies held by the Labour Party for decades in the Midlands and northern England. In the 2016 US presidential election,⁴ the victorious Republican candidate Donald Trump decisively won several states in the Rust Belt—the former manufacturing centre of the country. His gains in this region were particularly noteworthy in states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which had continually chosen Democratic candidates at each election since 1992. When there are referendums on European integration—and the 2016 Brexit referendum is the most recent prominent example—opposition to the European Union is often strong in former manufacturing areas where left-wing parties have been historically successful.

Nowadays, on the evening after each election, pundits comment on the working-class vote and gains by right-wing parties among workers. At the centre of attention are also the potential strategies of left-wing parties to again win the workers’ vote. There is therefore an interesting and somewhat paradoxical return of the working class in the media. In recent decades, social classes have become increasingly absent from public discourse. Evans and Tilley (2017) document the impressive decline of class in both media and party messages in Great Britain in the period from 1945 to 2015. Having coded the editorials of three newspapers (the Mirror, the Guardian and the Times) in each election campaign, they observe a strong drop in mentions of class after 1997. References to the ‘working class’ have also largely disappeared over time (already in the mid-1960s and then again in the late 1980s). In contrast, newspapers have more often used the categories ‘middle’ and ‘upper’ classes since the mid-1980s. Changes in the media to some extent echo transformations in the parties’ rhetoric. In the decades following the war, references to the working class were frequent in the Labour Party’s manifestos and leaders’ speeches at the annual party conferences. From the late 1980s onwards, the authors detect a strong decrease in mentions of the working class by the Labour Party.

Today, no one would contest the view that the close ties between the working class and social democratic parties have loosened. Despite this widespread impression of change, few studies propose a detailed empirical investigation of this phenomenon. The present book aims to fill this gap. More precisely, it has three goals. First and foremost, it aims to paint a nuanced picture of the transformation of the class basis of social democracy in a comparative perspective. Second, it aims to explore the mechanisms behind the weakening of the linkage between social democracy and workers. Third, the book also looks forward and discusses some new paths for the future of social democracy.

The transformation of the working-class vote has generated much discussion within social democratic parties, with much attention given to the topic of migration (see Mudde 2019). If social democracy has lost working-class support to the radical right, should it then endorse a more restrictive migration policy? In contrast, would it be easier to target middle-class voters who share a more liberal position on immigration? In the end, why should social democratic parties bother with their former working-class electorate if mainly middle-class voters support them? Social democracy currently faces significant electoral and ideological dilemmas. In this context, the book contributes by shedding light on the risks and opportunities of future strategies. Most importantly, it emphasises a need to precisely analyse the transformations in the working-class vote and the class profile of social democracy. Any thinking about the future of social democracy should start with a rigorous understanding of what has happened to the electoral base of social democracy in recent decades.

Re-Examining the Class Base of the Electorate for Social Democracy

I argue in this book that examination of the relationship between social democracy as a party family and the working class can benefit from three moves. First, I plead for a rethink of the definition and the boundaries of the working class using a class schema—the Oesch class schema (Oesch 2006)—which is sufficiently precise but at the same time flexible. In particular, it allows the growth of the new ‘service proletariat’ and the diversity of the salaried middle classes to be captured. Second, I propose that we should think more carefully about the definition of a working-class party in electoral sociology. Informed by historical contributions, I argue that a primary goal of social democracy has been a search for alliances. Being a working-class party does not per se exclude the mobilisation of other allied classes. Third, I argue that mobilisation by members of the political elite plays a crucial role in the transformation of the class base of social democracy. Ideological changes in the policy positions of social democratic parties and the way they have addressed voters have profoundly altered working-class mobilisation. Moreover, the rise of populist radical right parties has made issues of national identity and immigration more salient on the political agenda, with class-based mobilisation of workers becoming more difficult for social democratic parties.

Through these moves, I can add clarity and precision to the debate on the relationship between social democracy and the working-class electorate. Recent comparative contributions have been very informative on the loosening of the ties between social democracy and workers (see Best 2011; Gingrich and Häusermann 2015; Knutsen 2006; Moschonas 2002) but they have mostly relied on the classical division between manual workers (or the working class) and non-manual workers (or the middle class). They therefore face some difficulties in giving a precise evaluation of the changes in the class profile of social democracy and in assessing the new relationship with the heterogeneous non-manual segments of the electorate. This leads to a slight tendency to understand any evolution of social democracy as being a move from a working-class to a middle-class party. By using a sophisticated class schema and elaborating on different types of electoral coalitions, I will present a more nuanced and diversified trajectory of social democracy.

A focus on a ‘mainstream’ party family is relevant in the light of the growing literature on ‘niche’ or ‘challenger’ parties and especially populist radical right parties. While the sociology of radical right voting has emphasised growing support among working-class voters (e.g. Arzheimer 2013; Oesch 2008; Rydgren 2013), we know relatively little about what has become of social democracy today. Deductions about the changing character of social democracy are often made in studies focused on the radical right without a careful examination of the sociology of social democracy’s electorate and consideration of its specificities.

As previously mentioned, interest in the working-class vote has made a big return in the media since the 2016 Brexit referendum and the US election. The focus on the working class has sometimes been so intense that pundits have neglected the importance of middle- and high-income voters in these electoral outcomes (for a critical discussion on the American context, see Carnes and Lupu 2017). Above all, discussion has demonstrated a need for more scientific contributions on the working-class vote. Public debate has revealed significant weaknesses in the understanding of social class. First, definitions of the working class have often been imprecise. In some cases, small business owners—who have always had a predominantly conservative political orientation—have been conflated with the working class. In the American context, much of the public discussion has relied on exit polls, with social class being measured in terms of income or education, thus ignoring the long European tradition of occupation-based measures. Second, discussion around these events has revealed that old stereotypes regarding the working class have not disappeared but instead have become more prevalent and tended to become dominant. In particular, there is an increasingly current association of the working class with anger, violence and even stupidity (see Jones 2012 on the stigmatisation of the working class). In public discourse, ‘working class’ is increasingly becoming a synonym of what Marx called the ‘Lumpenproletariat’—a declassed group at the bottom of society (including thieves and beggars) that he clearly distinguished from the working class. The image of the proud class-conscious worker seems to definitively belong in the cemetery, or else is simply included in a broad conception of the ‘middle class.’ Third, the concept of working class in public discourse is increasingly associated with race—one speaks of ‘white’ working-class voters. Public discourse is contributing to a redefinition of social class as a cultural identity rather than an economic one, a redefinition influenced by American conservative circles (Peck 2019).⁵

Social Democracy in Crisis: Adding a Piece to the Puzzle of Understanding a Complex Transformation

This book claims that a better understanding of the class base of social democracy and of changes in it adds an important piece to the complex puzzle of the transformation of this party family. Since the 1980s, social democracy has been confronted with multiple challenges. The rise of neoliberalism, the end of the Cold War and economic globalisation have deeply shaken the social and ideological foundations of this party family (Cronin et al. 2011; Sassoon 1996). Moreover, changes in political economies have not only involved a sharp decline in manufacturing employment but also in the factors (e.g. plant size) that previously facilitated the collective organisation of workers (Pontusson 1995).

Social democracy (and also parties of the moderate right) has experienced a process of electoral decline in western Europe in recent decades (Martin 2018). This party family has lost vote shares in almost every European country since the 1990s (Rennwald and Pontusson 2020). It is nowadays common for social democracy to face new competition for its core voters from both the left and right of the political spectrum (Karreth et al. 2013). Previously, competition for the working-class vote was mainly limited to countries or regions with communist parties or Christian Democratic parties with a strong labour wing.

Traditionally, social democracy has fulfilled specific functions in the political system by giving voice and representation to disadvantaged socio-economic groups. Redirecting attention to the role of this party family therefore serves our understanding of the crisis in political representation, and especially of the disconnection of specific social groups from the political system. Moreover, this book provides insights into the shape and intensity of class conflict. The mobilisation of the working class by social democracy reinforced labour interests and brought class conflict to the centre of politics. At the same time, it also contributed to the pacification of class conflict and its integration into democratic politics—scholars conceive class voting as a ‘democratic class struggle’ (Korpi 1983; Lipset 1960). Therefore, the break in this class-party alignment suggests that class conflict might occur in a cruder and more violent way outside democratic politics and/or become more unbalanced by leaving collective mobilisation solely to the rich (Gilens 2012; Hacker and Pierson 2010).

Furthermore, the political mobilisation of the working class is crucial for various welfare state outcomes. According to the power resources theory (e.g. Korpi 1983, 1989)—an important explanation for cross-national variation in welfare state development—democratic politics provides workers with the opportunity to use their right to vote and right to organise in trade unions. If workers can use these political resources, they are able to compensate for their lack of power in the market sphere and can therefore reinforce labour interests relatively to capital interests. There is therefore a strong correspondence between the strength of the welfare state and the capacity of workers to organise as a class. In a kind of virtuous circle, working-class mobilisation reinforces the welfare state and the welfare state sustains workers’ independency towards market forces (and at the same time their political rights). The changes in the working-class vote that are analysed in this book indicate therefore a major transformation of the political forces advocating strong social policies. By extension, the rise of neoliberal politics render workers more vulnerable and less likely to use their rights in democratic politics, which again reinforces the dominance of market forces.

This book focuses on six western European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, the Netherlands and Switzerland) in which a social democratic (also called socialist or labour, depending on the country) party of importance is present. A decline in manufacturing employment over recent decades is a pervasive trend across all these countries. The decreasing weight of the industrial working class in the electorate therefore poses similar challenges to the social democratic parties. However, these parties have distinct histories and have evolved in different party systems. Political differences provide parties with incentives to turn to new segments of the electorate and to appeal to their voters in specific ways.

The German Social Democratic Party (SPD), the British Labour Party and the French Socialist Party (PS) have been leading representatives of the social democratic party family in Europe. However, they have distinct historical origins, different relationships to trade unions and rely on different ideological traditions. The French case is also particular because the Socialist Party was in fierce competition with the Communist Party in the post-war decades. The Dutch Labour Party (PvdA) and the Swiss Social Democratic Party (SPS) represent minor players in the international Socialist Party family. Although they are among the strongest parties in the context of their fragmented party systems, they have never been able to reach a majority either by themselves or by forming a coalition with smaller left and centre-left parties. By contrast, the Austrian Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) has reached strong levels of votes, being helped by the bipartisan tendency of the Austrian party system.⁶

Plan of the Book

Chapter 2 proposes a reflection on classes, on parties and on the relationship between the two. It clarifies the concept of social class used throughout the book and also stresses the need to complement sociological approaches with political approaches. Individuals are more likely to rely on their social class to form political preferences when political actors engage in class-based mobilisation. The chapter then discusses the contours of a ‘working-class party.’ Building on historical contributions, it emphasises the continual attempts by social democracy to look for support among allied classes. The chapter closes with a description of the Oesch class schema, which allows study of social democracy’s electorate with precision and flexibility.

Chapter 3 further discusses the concept of a ‘working-class party’ and proposes a distinction between four types of social democratic electoral coalitions. The chapter then turns to an analysis of the class basis of social democracy. The goal is to provide a baseline for the strength of social democracy’s working-class character in the decades following the Second World War. The demonstration focuses on the 1970s, a period in which manufacturing employment was still dominant. The analysis finds a strong working-class basis of social democracy in this period, and also an intermediate level of support among various classes.

Chapter 4 is dedicated to an empirical analysis of the class basis of social democracy at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It shows a strong tendency of social democratic parties towards becoming ‘cross-class parties,’ mobilising no specific social class in particular. Despite a widespread assumption, only a minority of social democratic parties have become ‘new class parties’ strongly mobilising specific segments of the salaried middle classes. The chapter also demonstrates that the working-class vote has become much more fragmented. Social democracy now competes with radical left parties, populist radical right parties and abstention for the working-class vote.

Chapter 5 reviews possible explanations of workers’ new voting patterns. In a first step, it reviews the changes that social democracy has opted for in recent decades: on the one hand, it has de-mobilised workers on the socio-economic dimension; on the other hand, it has increased the saliency of the socio-cultural dimension. The chapter then examines the political attitudes of workers to redistribution and immigration. The results indicate an important continuity in the policy preferences of classes. This suggests that changes in the political supply are critical to understand the new relationship between social democracy and its working-class electorate.

Finally, Chapter 6 concludes by summarising the main results of the book. It closes with a discussion on the renewal of social democracy. With this aim, it evaluates the role of the working class in social democracy’s future electoral strategies. It discusses the risks for social democracy in abandoning the workers’ vote and examines some factors that might facilitate the electoral mobilisation of workers in the future. It also reviews current experiences of various social democratic parties and proposals to reorient their ideology and implement new strategies.

Notes

• 1. Throughout this book, I use the labels ‘social democracy’ and ‘social democratic’ to refer to the parties (and the party family) that have historically adhered to the project for democratic socialism. Note that I use the terms ‘labour,’ ‘socialist’ and ‘social democratic’ interchangeably. I use the term ‘social democratic’ more often as it is more familiar in continental and northern Europe, where the powerful Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) at the end of the nineteenth century served as a model for the creation of similar parties in other countries (Sassoon 1996: 9–11).

• 2. Pierre Mauroy’s statement is quoted in Lefebvre and Sawicki (2006: 233). Own translation. The complete original statement is the following: ‘Nous devons parler plus fort aux travailleurs. Lionel, il faut que tu adresses un message à la France qui travaille. Le mot ‘ouvrier’ n’est pas un gros mot.’

• 3. Le Pen’s speech is quoted in Gougou (2015: 323). Own translation. The complete original statement is the following: ‘N’ayez pas peur, chers compatriotes! Rentrez dans l’espérance! L’événement, c’est le 5 mai. En attendant, n’ayez pas peur de rêver, vous les petits, les sans-grade, les exclus. Ne vous laissez pas enfermer dans les vieilles distinctions de la gauche et de la droite, vous qui avez supporté depuis vingt ans toutes les erreurs et les malversations des politiciens. Vous les mineurs, les métallos, les ouvrières et les ouvriers de toutes ces industries ruinées par l’euro-mondialisme de Maastricht.’

• 4. The Democratic Party in the US is not a social democratic party. However, since the New Deal of the 1930s, American labour has normally perceived the Democratic Party as its political home.

• 5. The category of the ‘white’ working class has also made its way into academic contributions (see, for example, Gest 2016).

• 6. The vote shares obtained by those parties in parliamentary elections since 1945 are available in the Appendix.