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- Aucante, Yohann, et al.
(författare)
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The Puzzle of Ideological change in contemporary Social democracy: A comparative case-study of Britain, France, and Sweden in the new millennium
- 2013
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Ingår i: Presented at the Council of European Studies, 20th Annual Conference of Europeanists, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 25-27, June 2013.
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper rests on an intriguing puzzle: Why do political parties sometimes modify their essential ideological tenets while at other times they seem to stick to their doctrines no matter what happens? Previous research is split regarding the effect on party ideology development from election defeat, party system change and party leadership change. Most studies show how parties tend to respond and adapt to such changes while others conclude that inertia seems to follow even in the face of drastic external shocks. Given the context of a financial and economic crisis of historic and global magnitude since 2007-2008, with harsh consequences in Europe, we argue that ideological debate within traditional social democratic/socialist parties would be likely to follow. Indeed, they have played a key role in previous instances of deep economic crisis. Ideological reconsiderations would be even more likely given the fact that several social democratic parties have found themselves in dire straits concerning election outcomes and party system challenges. In this paper we will discuss social democratic responses to these combined challenges of economic crisis and other external shocks. As we will detail below, we suggest some of this confusion about party ideological change can be sorted by taking organizational variables into account. We have designed a comparative case study with social democracy as our focus. This makes it possible for us to discuss the dominant ideology change theories in the light of various party organisation contexts within the same party family. We have elicited three different brands of the reformist left tradition in Europe, namely Labourist - the British Labour Party; Social democratic - the Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP), and Socialist - the French Parti Socialiste (PS). Although the three case parties have different ideological histories, they do share some basic ideological features. At the same time, they exhibit different organisational traits within the reformist left family (Kitschelt 1994).
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