Political Parties and American Democracy Mini-Conference I: Left Parties in Advanced Capitalism

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Part of Mini-Conference

• Political Parties and American Democracy Mini-Conference I

Session Description

This panel, on Left Parties in Advanced Capitalism, examines how parties traditionally associated with the working classes and organized labor have responded to the political changes brought on by advanced capitalism. It brings together scholars of comparative and American politics and comparative political economy to understand the relationship of party organizations to inequality, partisan realignment, and democratic decline. The left has changed profoundly over the past forty years, combining neoliberal economic orthodoxies with social democratic commitments in ways that have eroded their relationships with their traditional constituencies. These papers examine what “the left” means in a neoliberal era, and they consider how social democratic ideas, organizations, networks, and leaders have adapted over forty years.
This panel includes four papers that examine social democratic parties such as the Democratic party in the United States, the Swedish Social Democrats, the British Labour Party, and the German Social Democratic Party. Together, these papers show that social democratic parties underwent significant organizational and programmatic change in the late twentieth century. Two of the papers, “Practical Social Democracy” by Jonas Pontusson and “The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same: ideological stagnation in the contemporary mainstream left” by Max Kiefel, look at intra-party organizational dynamics. They first note that left parties’ policy outputs have changed: the parties responded differently to recent economic crises (i.e. the 2008 financial crisis) than they did to stagflation in the 1970s; since the 1990s, these parties have become less redistributive and more pro-affluent. Kiefel conducts Bayesian case analysis on the US Democratic party and the British Labour party, finding that ideological reinvention was due to the replacement of trade union elites by modernizing political professionals. Pontusson examines major policy shifts by the Swedish Social Democrats and the failure to reverse bourgeois reforms in 2014-2022, as well as third-way policies in the United Kingdom and Germany. This paper argues that social democratic parties moved away from a traditional focus on economic inequality because of the decline of former trade-union officials as ministers in social democratic governments.
By showing that the decision-makers within left parties were changing, these papers trace the rupture of the long-symbiotic relationship between organized labor and social democratic parties. They help us understand how the policy goals of these parties changed, and why the left parties adopted economic policies—including austerity, retrenchment, and deregulation—that they formerly opposed. The next two papers examine the relationship of party organizations to other political groups.
In “Organized Power and Networks within the Contemporary Democratic Party Coalition,” Ian Berlin, Jacob Hacker, Fiona Kniaz, Amelia Malpas, Paul Pierson, and Sam Zacher aims to quantify interest group policy influence in the Democratic Party’s extended network. It leverages three new sources of data on left-affiliated interest groups, including their electoral expenditures, financial resources, and membership; whether or not Democratic members of congress tout relationships with these groups; and interviews with activists involved in Democratic policymaking. Finally, Didi Kuo and Noam Lupu, in “The Electoral Roots of the Third Way,” examine how left parties in Britain, the United States, and Germany embraced a strategy of triangulation—combining policies of the right with social democratic commitments—and ask whether this was motivated by public demand, or instead by party elites. The paper is interested in public opinion on left parties in the third way era, and the composition of pro-third way factions.
The challenges facing advanced democracies today are rooted in widespread distrust in government and parties, as well as economic grievances rooted in advanced capitalism. Parties of the left are undergoing realignment, with a base of educated professionals rather than the working class. They have yet to develop programmatic commitments that seem to address the problems related to advanced capitalism, and therefore fuel discontent even as they continue to win elections. This panel situates social democratic parties in debates about political economy, democratic responsiveness, and backsliding.

Sub Unit

• Theme Panel

Cosponsor

• Division 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Organized Power and Networks within the Contemporary Democratic Party Coalition - Jacob S. Hacker, Yale University; Paul Pierson, University of California, Berkeley; Sam Zacher, Yale University

• The Electoral Roots of the Third Way - Didi Kuo, Stanford University; Noam Lupu, Vanderbilt University

• Practical Social Democracy - Jonas Pontusson, University of Geneva

• The More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same - Max Kiefel, Harvard University

Chair

• Peter A. Hall Harvard University

Discussants

• Jane R. Gingrich University of Oxford

• Julia Lynch University of Pennsylvania