ABSTRACT
As the liberal sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf concluded in 1979, the ‘Social Democratic century has come to an end’.1 Social democratic interventionist welfare state policies and deficit spending in times of economic expansion had contributed to the structural economic crisis in Western Europe that became evident after the oil crisis of 1973. The new policy agenda of global integration of markets, deregulation and privatization was not compatible with established social democratic ideology and values. At that time, moreover, many social democratic parties already seemed to have passed the peak of their electoral support. The beginning of the socio-economic transformation of Western Europe from an industrial society to a society based more and more on the service sector, without the same tradition of trade union organization or voting patterns, would inevitably lead to a further marked erosion in the social democratic predominantly working-class milieu and, thus, electoral decline, an analysis that seemed to be corroborated by the loss of power, for example, of the British Labour Party in 1979 and the West German Social Democrats in 1982.
