Macarena Ares and Silja Häusermann

Mainstream parties of the left are in decline. But progressive politics is thriving far beyond its traditional blue-collar base

• Adopting rightwing policies ‘does not help centre-left win votes’

Wed 10 Jan 2024

Over the past two decades, election results in western Europe have been framed within the narrative of a crisis of the left. Think of the near-implosion of the French Socialist party as a case in point. In 2022 the Socialist presidential candidate received less than 2% of the first-round vote, the worst presidential election result in the party’s history.

Beyond the ups and downs of specific elections, the performance of social democratic parties has, on average, been marked by a tremendous decline across western European democracies, from a vote share of nearly 40% to below 20%.

But fixating on the fate of social democratic parties alone is misleading: it overlooks the broader fate of progressive politics that prioritises the core principles of egalitarianism, inclusion and sustainability. While mainstream parties on the left are declining, progressive politics is transforming, renewing and in some instances even thriving.

Many of the diagnoses of the left’s challenges rely on assumptions that are at odds with recent research (which we draw on in six new briefs).

One of these flawed claims is the supposed decline of working-class support for the left, which obscures the massive voter gains that progressive parties have made beyond their traditional constituencies. This misinterpretation is rooted in outdated notions about the social composition of progressive party electorates. True, the socioeconomic structure in western Europe today is very different from that which underpinned the golden age of social democracy in the postwar years of the 20th century. The traditional left electorate – industrial workers – has become a minority in most western European democracies, representing 10-20% of the workforce only. However, the decline of the industrial workforce does not signal the demise of progressive politics, for two reasons.

The working class has changed: workers in the service sector, particularly in care, personal and recreational services, are today the most disadvantaged. They differ from the industrial working class in that they tend to be younger, female and often have a migration background. Second, voters from the educated middle classes, often employed in services or the public sector, have become the largest and most loyal electorate of progressive parties, whether social democratic, socialist, green or left-libertarian. Progressive parties today engage with a diverse range of voters, from people in precarious or insecure work, women and migrants, to the expanding middle classes. Any analysis that keeps insisting on the declining blue-collar working class as the sole viable electoral constituency of the left underestimates the electoral base of progressive parties overall.

To wield political influence, progressive politicians and parties need to consolidate support from beyond the industrial working class. Broadening their electoral base to middle-class voters does not need to weaken the redistributive message. On the contrary, research shows that even the newer segments of the left electorate strongly favour progressive, redistributive economic and social policies – beyond their support for social inclusion and sustainability.

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Another false assumption that often skews analysis of the crisis of the left is that the middle-class voters induce a rightward shift on such topics as income redistribution and egalitarianism. Such assumptions are often made about professionals supporting green and left-libertarian parties in the progressive bloc. These left voters tend to have higher levels of income and education than average, and, at first glance, seem to prioritise demands for cultural liberalism, liberal migration policy or environmental measures over questions of social justice. However, attracting the support of these voters will not cost progressive parties their redistributive agenda, as middle-class voters are drawn to parties advocating both economic redistribution and socio-cultural inclusion.

The belief that these voters prioritise one over the other is not supported by the findings of our survey research. On welfare state intervention and income redistribution, green voters do not differ from social-democratic voters at all. Both groups are consistently leftwing in their economic considerations. These voters’ commitment to egalitarian redistributive policy is also manifest in their clear opposition to welfare chauvinism. More than two-thirds of social democratic, green or radical left voters reject restrictions on migrants’ access to social assistance. Moreover, redistributive issues are high on green parties’ agendas. Since the 2010s, in particular, they have emphasised these topics to an even greater extent than social democratic parties.

• Macarena Ares is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Barcelona. Silja Häusermann is a professor of political science at the University of Zurich. Both are co-convenors of the Progressive Politics Research Network, whose findings are published here

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/10/europe-left-crisis-research-parties-progressive-politics

Study of European electoral data suggests social democratic parties alienate supporters by moving towards the political centre

• Is Europe’s left really in crisis? It’s complex but there is hope

Jon Henley Europe correspondent

@jonhenleyWed 10 Jan 2024 06.00 CET

• Adopting rightwing policies on issues such as immigration and the economy does not help centre-left parties win votes, according to new analysis of European electoral and polling data.

Faced with a 20-year decline in their vote share, accompanied by rising support for the right, far right and sometimes the far left, social democratic parties across Europe have increasingly sought salvation by moving towards the political centre.

However the analysis, published on Wednesday, shows that centre-left parties promising, for example, to be tough on immigration or unrelenting on public spending are both unlikely to attract potential voters on the right, and risk alienating existing progressive supporters.

“Voters tend to prefer the original to the copy,” said Tarik Abou-Chadi, an associate professor of European politics at the University of Oxford and the co-founder of the Progressive Politics Research Network (PPRNet), which launched on Wednesday.

Abou-Chadi said the team of political scientists, from universities including Barcelona, Lausanne, Vienna, Zurich and Berlin, was not “aiming to advise or act as political consultants” but to present “careful, empirical, data-based” research.

“We’re looking to provide a more solid, accurate foundation for an open political debate about progressive politics, who votes for progressive parties and why, and the strategies available to them,” he said. “That involves a bit of myth-busting.”

One of the most significant misperceptions the team’s work had revealed, he said, concerned the nature of support for centre-left parties in Europe. “Social structures have been utterly transformed since the heyday of social democracy,” Abou-Chadi said.

“The average social democratic voter today is very, very different from 50, even 20 years ago – and unlikely to be an industrial worker. The data also shows much of this new constituency is actually both culturally progressive and economically leftwing.”

Analysis showed little real voter competition between the centre left and the radical right, as some social democratic politicians argue. Progressive parties “need to understand and represent the social structures of the 21st century”, Abou-Chadi said.

One of the key lessons was that “trying to imitate rightwing positions is just not a successful strategy for the left”, he said. Two studies in particular, looking at so-called welfare chauvinism and fiscal policy, illustrated the point, the researchers said.

Björn Bremer of the Central European University in Vienna said a survey in Spain, Italy, the UK and Germany and larger datasets from 12 EU countries showed that since the financial crisis of 2008, “fiscal orthodoxy” had been a vote loser for the centre left.

“Social democratic parties that have backed austerity fail to win the support of voters worried about public debt, and lose the backing of those who oppose austerity,” Bremer said. “Centre-left parties that actually impose austerity lose votes.”

As an example, Bremer cited the UK Labour party’s losing 2015 election campaign, which focused on fiscal responsibility. “[When] voters really care about fiscal policy, they’ll go for the ‘issue owner’ – in this instance, the Conservatives, who they’ll always believe are more credible on that question,” he said.

Fiscal orthodoxy – cutting taxes, capping spending, limiting public debt – worked for social democratic parties such as Tony Blair’s New Labour and Gerhard Schröder’s SPD in Germany, but that was “a period of relative stability and growth”, he said.

“We’re now in a different era. The data strongly suggests centre-left parties can build a coalition of voters who believe a strong welfare state, effective public services and real investment, for example in the green transition, are essential,” Bremer said.

“But doing the opposite – offering a contradictory programme that promotes austerity but promises to protect public services and the welfare state, and hoping voters will swallow such fairytales – failed in the 2010s, and is likely to fail again.”

Similarly, said Matthias Enggist of the University of Lausanne, analysis of data from eight European countries showed no evidence that welfare chauvinism – broadly, restricting immigrants’ access to welfare – was a successful strategy for the left.

“There’s little support for it among actual leftwing voters – Green, social democrat or radical left – or potential leftwing voters on the right,” Enggist said. “And leftwing voters mostly really dislike discrimination between immigrants and nationals.”

Voters who do support welfare chauvinism, meanwhile, are likely to not even consider voting for a left-leaning party, he said, adding there was no evidence that this was a strategy to win back enough traditional working-class votes to significantly boost the electoral fortunes of left parties.

Even in Denmark, where a Social Democrat-led government has introduced one of Europe’s toughest anti-immigration regimes, electoral data suggested that restricting immigrants’ rights is not popular with a significant number of the party’s voters.

Politicians on the left who argue the case for welfare chauvinism “overestimate its potential to win new voters”, Enggist said.

“The evidence clearly shows they overestimate the electoral relevance of traditional, white working-class voters – and underestimate how strongly their current middle-class voters care about immigrants being treated decently and equally.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/jan/10/adopting-rightwing-policies-does-not-help-centre-left-win-votes