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 This misinterpretation is rooted in outdated notions about the social composition of progressive party electorates.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

Adopting rightwing policies ´does not help centre-left wing votes’

January 10, 2024 dnmufcLeave a comment

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

A reformer from a bygone era: What the Cummings saga tells us about British governance

May 27, 2020 dnmufcLeave a comment

Patrick Diamond writes that the Cummings coronavirus row has wider implications for the machinery of British government. These revolve around the status of political advisers and the future of Cummings’s state reform visions.

As the row over Dominic Cummings’s breach of lockdown rules escalates, threatening to engulf the entire Johnson Administration, it is worth reflecting on the implications of the dispute for the future of British governance more generally. The big questions that arise go beyond the details of Mr Cummings’s breach and the fundamental principles of propriety, truth, and integrity in high office. They concern how the machinery of government is likely to develop in the future.

The first implication is what this case tells us about the status of political advisers in British politics. The Code of Conduct for Special Advisers published by the Cabinet Office is clear that the purpose of political advisers is ‘to add a political dimension to the advice and assistance available to Ministers’. According to the official constitutional rationale, special advisers protect the neutrality of civil servants, undertaking tasks of a political nature which – if performed by officials – would undermine their ability to serve future governments of a different political complexion. Civil servants claim to welcome the presence of special advisers who provide knowledge and insight on issues of future policy, while offering steers on the political views of Ministers. The benign interpretation is that the British system of government cultivates a mutually beneficial partnership, a ‘governing marriage’ between Ministers, officials, and political appointees.

Certainly, there have been controversial special advisers before, many of whom were forced to resign because they breached the unwritten rule that political aides must never become the media story – the most pertinent recent examples being Theresa May’s notorious aides, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill. Yet Timothy and Hill were, by and large, backroom operators who were fired ultimately because their boss was politically weakened in the aftermath of the 2017 general election debacle. Without question, it is an important moment in the development of the British political system that a special adviser such as Dominic Cummings is able to hold their own impromptu press conference in the garden of 10 Downing Street, taking questions from journalists while holding court in front of the world’s media.

Indeed, paragraph 14 of the Special Advisers Code states that, ‘Special advisers must not take public part in political controversy, through any form of statement whether in speeches or letters to the press, or in books, social media, articles or leaflets. They must observe discretion and express comment with moderation, avoiding personal attacks, and would not normally speak in public for their Minister or the Department’. The function of advisers is, ‘to represent the views of their Minister to the media’, rather than to justify their own actions or personal behaviour. In this extraordinary situation, Ministers are being sent onto the airwaves to defend the position of a political adviser. This is a remarkable moment.

The implications of Cummings’s media appearance will be far-reaching. We have reached a critical juncture, constitutionally a point of no return. There is likely to be growing pressure for special advisers to give testimony where they are involved in public controversies, notably to parliamentary select committees. Cummings’s actions will bolster the arguments of those who insist special advisers have a malign impact on the conduct of government, reducing civil servants to the status of ‘passive functionaries’ and politicising public administration. Cummings is a well-known critic of the British civil service. He regards the permanent bureaucracy as slow-moving, unimaginative, cumbersome, detached from seismic shifts in the world of technology and ideas. Cummings’s explicit goal is to ‘drain the swamp’ of the Whitehall bureaucracy, moving towards a ‘them and us’ model where civil servants no longer offer advice, but merely do what Ministers tell them. Civil servants become the implementors of policy rather than the initiators of policy; delivery agents, not ministerial advisers with the capacity to ‘speak truth to power’.

The second implication of the dispute is what the row tells us about the status of the institutional innovator and disrupter in the system of government. It may well be that Cummings’s mission to rewire the British state while radically recasting the Whitehall machinery is dead in the water. His ideas about how to reorganise the state machine might be deemed necessary for an age of disruption, but he will find formidable forces of conservatism in the government machine ranged against him, just at the moment his political capital is depleted badly. One difficulty is that Cummings is attempting to orchestrate change from the centre in 10 Downing Street. In the British system of government, it is departments that usually reign supreme. Departments are the centres of decision-making power, autonomous territories where policy is formulated, budgets are allocated, and implementation is co-ordinated. Even nominally powerful prime ministers with landslide parliamentary majorities such as Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair discovered that departments have the capacity to thwart the will of the centre.

Another problem is that resistance to fundamental change in the government machine comes not only from civil servants, but Ministers themselves. Away from the highly politicised centre of power in Number 10, Ministers by and large work closely with their officials who they regard as problem-solvers, Machiavellian fixers, loyal courtiers, and expert bureaucrats who know about how to drive through change, navigating the byzantine rituals of Whitehall. The tension is even more acute in a Conservative government, where traditionalists favour the preservation of existing institutions, upholding the long-standing Northcote-Trevelyan principles of impartiality and merit-based appointment. At the beginning of 2020 when Cummings went public with his plan to recruit dozens of ‘weirdo’ data scientists into government supplanting ostensibly ineffectual civil servants, a Cabinet Minister told The Times:‘One of the big problems with [Cummings’s] pull the pin out of the grenade, drop it in the bunker, and see what happens approach is that it is so destabilising…we take several steps backwards before we’ve even started’.

In the world after the pandemic, it is very probable that the debate about state reform in Britain will take a quite different direction to that envisaged by the Cummings’s prospectus. The state is back as an economic actor, and as such, thirty years of antipathy to government as a force for good may be waning. It is public servants who have ensured that furlough wages and benefits are paid on time, while businesses are protected. Discussion will centre on how to restore the capacity of government to tackle major challenges from strategic risks such as future pandemics and climate change, to the long-term implications of the crisis, notably tackling public health inequalities while repurposing institutions. Unquestionably, the overly centralised nature of the British state will come under renewed scrutiny. In this climate, Cummings may well appear a reformer from a bygone era.

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About the Author

Patrick Diamond is Associate Professor of Public Policy at Queen Mary, University of London, and a former Government Special Adviser.

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Only a new wave of socialism can end the great squeeze on us all We must break with the free market consensus established by Thatcher

September 9, 2013September 9, 2013 dnmufcLeave a comment

OWEN JONES

Sunday 8 September 2013
Independent

Britain is now suffering the longest fall in living standards since Queen Victoria sat on the throne. If this Great Squeeze isn’t the key issue of the day, the entire political system might as well dissolve itself on grounds of irrelevance and moral bankruptcy. It would be easy – but wrong – to lay all the blame at the feet of the wicked Tories, however wicked they may be. The truth is the Great Squeeze began six years before David Cameron and Nick Clegg hooked up in the Rose Garden, and four years before Lehman Brothers toppled. From 2004 onwards, the incomes of the bottom half began to flatline; for the bottom third, they actually started to drop.
But the Great Squeeze has been given renewed intensity and prolonged duration by the Tories’ hijacking of the financial crisis. As the Resolution Foundation has uncovered, one in five workers now toils for below the living wage: since 2009, the numbers have rocketed from 3.4 million to 4.8 million. On the eve of Cameron’s assumption of power, 18 per cent of women worked for less than the living wage; it’s now a quarter. Nearly four out of five jobs created under this government pay less than £7.95 an hour. These jobs are often precarious, too: there is now a million-strong army of zero-hour contract workers, a return to a supposedly bygone era when dockers would trek to the yard, sticking their hands in the air in the hope they might get some work that day. Real wages are, on average, £1,500 a year lower than when the Tory-Lib Dem cabal bedded into power, and inflation is higher for essential items, punishing the poorest most. More than a million children are set to be plunged into poverty by government policies, according to the Child Poverty Action Group. And for the first time since Berlin fell to the Allies, the next generation faces being poorer than their parents.

The symptoms of the Great Squeeze are everywhere. We can only speculate as to how Wonga executives chose to celebrate their 36 per cent surge in profit. Vultures have rich pickings in Cameron’s Britain: a million families a month now depend on legal loan sharks – allowed to charge extortionate rates – often to pay for food, heating, mortgages and rents. Half a million people depend on food banks, while the Energy Bill Revolution campaign earlier this year found nearly a quarter of families having to choose between buying food and heating their homes. Here’s to the seventh richest country in the world, whose poorest people struggle to feed themselves. Politicians of all stripes constantly preach work as the route out of hardship, but most of Britain’s poor have to work for their poverty. And although the Great Squeeze hits those at the bottom hardest, the pandemic of sleepless nights over bills, rents and mortgages is consuming the lives of millions of Britons.

If Labour had a set of courageous policies to tackle this Great Squeeze, it wouldn’t have left a whopping big vacuum filled with personality-driven tittle-tattle. Indeed, the absence of answers has had even more disastrous consequences: the devious, reprehensible redirecting of anger at immigrants, public sector workers, unemployed people – anyone except those responsible. But such is the scale of the crisis that it needs radical solutions, breaking with the free market consensus established by Margaret Thatcher: a new wave of bread-and-butter socialism.

To begin with, the case has to be made for trade unions, including changing a law that automatically presumes against them. They may be Britain’s biggest democratic movement – representing, as they do, more than six million call-centre workers, supermarket shelf-stackers, nurses and other workers – but they are routinely demonised by the media, portrayed as all but illegitimate pariahs. The past few months have seen yet another attempt to drive them from political life, on the now demonstrably false pretext of alleged vote-rigging in Falkirk. But trade unions are the most effective means for workers to collectively organise for better wages and conditions: it is their weakness that allowed wages to drop even in boom time. In another economic crisis, President Franklin D Roosevelt – no socialist – trumpeted trade unions for these reasons. If a party established by the labour movement fails to do so, it might as well book an appointment at Dignitas.

The need for a living wage is painfully obvious. There has to be a reckoning, at some point, when it is seen as unacceptable to pay wages that do not allow individuals to live a decent life. The establishment of a living wage would reduce the billions currently spent subsidising low pay through tax credits and other in-work benefits. It is an economic stimulus, too: the rich celebrate tax cuts by topping up bank accounts in the Cayman Islands; the poor are likely to spend whatever extra money ends up in their pockets.

Then there’s the housing crisis. Five million are trapped on social housing waiting lists; millions are left at the mercy of unregulated private landlords, many of whom are hiking rents as wages fall. According to the Yes to Homes campaign, rents will soar by 46 per cent by the end of the decade without radical action. Allowing councils to build homes – creating jobs and reducing housing benefit in the process – would prevent living in an affordable home being a far-fetched ambition.

British parents spend a third of their income on childcare: no wonder, then, that the average child now costs £148,000 to raise. Compare this with Sweden where costs are capped at 3 per cent of income, and all can enjoy an excellent standard of state-funded childcare. A similar system would pay for itself by raising the number of women in work and increasing the tax revenues flowing to the Exchequer.

The disastrously privatised railways are an unaffordable luxury for large swathes of the population, and rail fares are set to soar 9.1 per cent on some routes. That’s why Labour should bow to popular opinion and take each franchise back into public ownership as it expires, allowing revenues to be used to reduce ticket prices rather than topping up executives’ bank accounts. Similarly, energy bills have gone up £100 a year since 2010, and a quarter of the population put up with “unacceptably cold” homes in the winter because of financial woes. No wonder 69 per cent want energy renationalised: time for Labour to champion a new, democratic form of social ownership with consumers in charge.

More radicalism is needed, too. Why not learn from Germany with an interventionist industrial policy, creating hundreds of thousands of renewable-energy jobs to fill in the “missing middle” of properly paid, secure jobs? Why not cap the interest rates of legal loan sharks? Why not turn bailed-out banks into a public investment bank to rebuild the economy?

Labour will not win the next election by simply pointing out that the Tories have emptied the pockets of the electorate. Mourning its plight will convince no one. Voters must believe that Labour can finally end this Great Squeeze. And without bread-and-butter socialism, the remorseless turning of neighbour against neighbour will only escalate – and, against the odds, it will be Cameron who emerges victorious.