Reinventing Social Democracy? Political Opportunity Structures in Germany and Spain

Abstract

Over a long and distinguished career, Willie Paterson has made landmark contributions in many areas of political science. German and European Social Democracy dominated his early career, however. In the 1980s and 1990s he conceived and led many projects examining the vicissitudes of Social Democratic parties and we were privileged to work with him in many of these. In most West European countries this was a period of crisis for Social Democracy, and much of Willie’s work sought to identify the underlying causes of electoral defeat, ideological disorientation and organisational disarray. At the same time he sought to identify the future of Social Democracy (Paterson and Thomas, 1986) and, in particular, to identify the emergence of new ideological and programmatic perspectives that might form the basis for regeneration (Gillespie and Paterson, 1993). He concluded that it had not one, but several different futures (Paterson and Thomas, 1986, p. 16). Twenty years later this conclusion is strikingly vindicated by the increasing diversity of the Social Democratic ‘party family’ and the breach that has opened between those parties that have embraced ‘Third Way’ Social Democracy and those that have continued to resist it. This chapter explains divergence in terms of cross-national differences in the ‘political opportunity structures’ that have shaped the ideological development of the parties.KeywordsElectoral CompetitionSocial Market EconomyOrganisational ConstraintSocial Democratic PartyGerman ContextThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.