The Rise and Fall of Social Democracy, 1918–2017

Abstract

We describe the electoral history of one of Europe’s most successful party families over the past 100 years in 31 countries. With a unique and newly collected dataset of national election results and a large number of economic and social variables measured for each country-election observation, we find that two main factors drive the electoral performance of social democratic parties: public-sector spending and the size of the manufacturing sector. Our findings suggest that most of the fall in support for social democratic parties in recent years is correlated with a decline in the number of industrial workers as well as a reduction in the propensity of social democratic parties’ core supporters (industrial workers and public-sector employees) to vote for them.