Suchergebnisse

Social democratic parties are crumbling at the polls. Surprisingly, however, the causes of this demise remain largely unexplored. This article contributes to filling this gap in the research by studying the long-term impact of welfare state generosity on the vote share of social democratic parties in 16 Western European democracies. If the welfare state indeed was a key factor behind social democratic growth in the past, we ask whether the recent plight of these parties is down to a reversal of their previously dominant success factor? The article makes three principal findings. First, we show that social democratic parties primarily benefited electorally from expansive reforms at lower levels of welfare state generosity. Second, we find that this dynamic of diminishing returns also helps explain the demise of the social democratic party family in the whole of Western Europe. Lastly, our results reveal that programmatic turns to the right predict electoral losses in the least generous welfare states, whereas such shifts either pass unnoticed or predict vote gains in the most generous ones. We conclude by arguing that the structure of welfare state institutions is one important explanation for variations in the demise of the once powerful social democratic party family.

The data described in this report were collected for the DIPAC-project: Decreased Ideological Polarisation and Conflict in Western Europe? This report describes DIPAC Citizen data set. The first part of this report gives information on the project as a whole, including discussions of case selection and core concepts. Following this, there are a technical report the DIPAC citizen data set. ; Minskad ideologisk polarisering och konflikt i Västeuropa? (Mipok)

The data described in this report were collected for the DIPAC-project.1 The project's aim was to closer investigate the proposed crisis of parties and party systems in Western Europe during the last decades. To fulfil this aim, one of our main goals was to collect electoral manifestos from all parties in the respective party system for all selected years, and code their ideological contents. The main reason for our choice to code manifestos was to provide a more detailed and nuanced foundation for analyzing ideological polarization and ideological change in Western European party system than the saliency-oriented perspective that has hitherto dominated manifesto-research. In this report, we conclude that the DIPAC coding of ideological position has yielded highly reliable measures, whereas the coding of saliency should be interpreted with some caution with regard to the GAL-TAN dimension and sub-dimensions. ; Minskad ideologisk polarisering och konflikt i Västeuropa? (Mipok)

The data described in this report were collected for the DIPAC-project: Decreased Ideological Polarisation and Conflict in Western Europe? This report describes DIPAC Citizen data set. The first part of this report gives information on the project as a whole, including discussions of case selection and core concepts. Following this, there are a technical report the DIPAC citizen data set. ; Minskad ideologisk polarisering och konflikt i Västeuropa? (Mipok)