Towards a Lighter Shade of Red? Social Democratic Parties and the Rise of Neo-liberalism in Western Europe, 1970–1999

Abstract

This paper focuses on the ideological development of 19 social democratic party ideologies in Western Europe. The years of interest are the last three decades of the twentieth century, when the broadly cherished Keynesian model was gradually replaced by a revived form of classical liberal economic thinking, i.e., neoliberalism. In order to measure the impact of these neoliberal values on social democratic parties, I use the widely utilized Manifesto Data Set and develop a new, exclusively socioeconomic, left–right scale that mainly focuses on core political questions regarding the scope of the state, the role of markets and the allocation of public goods. The results from the descriptive analysis reveal that neoliberal values did gain influence also within social democratic parties, although no more than four parties demonstrate a significant and long-standing ideological change towards the neoliberal pole. A less clear neoliberal trend, moreover, can be distinguished in five additional parties while the remaining ten parties within the West European social democratic party family did not experience any enduring ideological shifts.