ABSTRACT
Social democratic parties across Europe have, over the past thirty years, adapted to a new economic and/or political climate following the end of the post-war consensus and the Bretton Woods system within which it was embedded. ‘Traditional’ social democratic goals, such as Keynesian demand management, welfare expansion, fiscal redistribution, full employment, and corporatist decision-making have increasingly come to be seen as impracticable. This has prompted several commentators to speak of the demise of social democracy (at least in its ‘traditional’ form) as a viable political project (Gray, 1996; Giddens, 1998; Kitschelt, 1994; Kuisma, 2007). In an attempt to adjust to this apparent demise of their ‘traditional’ social democratic programme, social democratic parties have adopted, to varying degrees, alternative policies and programmes. These changes crystallized over time into a ‘new’ social democratic programme characterized by a focus on supplyside economic policies that incorporate many of the neoliberal criticisms aimed at ‘traditional’ social democracy. ‘New’ social democratic programmes thus include active labour market policies, greater conditionality in welfare provisions, a fiscal policy geared towards incentivizing entrepreneurialism and work, and the prioritization of tackling inflation over unemployment (see, for instance, Scharpf, 1991; Kitschelt, 1994; Gamble and Wright, 1999; Callaghan, 2000a; Glyn, 2001; Moschonas, 2002; Schmidtke, 2002; Bonoli and Powell, 2004). At the same time, and as a central part of the same transition process, the goal of a supranational
‘Social Europe’1 has increasingly been adopted as a central pillar in ‘new’ social democratic party programmes. Social democratic actors have increasingly come to believe and/or state that, through supranational cooperation, social democratic parties can overcome many of the obstacles, preventing the address of their ‘traditional’ concerns, that they have experienced at the national level. Thus, Hooghe, Marks and Wilson show how, ‘majorities in one [social democratic] party after another have come to perceive European integration as a means for projecting social democratic goals in a liberalizing world economy’ (2002: 975).
