ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to examine the turn towards ‘Social Europe’ by the social democratic parties that form our present study. As with Chapter 3, the aim here is to draw upon a real definition of the parties under investigation in order to provide an insight into the motives underpinning the actions and reactions of the constitutive actors with regard to the contextual changes they find themselves confronted with. The chapter therefore seeks to examine the way in which ‘new’ social democratic party relations were constructed, and subsequently reproduced, paying particular attention to the role of a ‘Social Europe’ agenda within this process. The chapter therefore provides an analytical narrative tracing the development of the European policy of the five parties under investigation, focusing particularly on the way in which this policy changed as social democratic parties shifted from ‘traditional’ to ‘new’ structures of social democratic party relations, as conceptualized in Chapters 2 and 3.
