New article out in World Politcs. We analyze how different groups react to varying programs of social democratic parties. We find less trade-offs than often assumed. Generally, more left-progressive programs increase support among social democratic potentials muse.jhu.edu
Discussion about SD strategies often assume trade-offs in appealing to different groups. Simply put, progressive policies could attract young, educated, middle class voters but might alienate older, less educated, working class voters. But there is little evidence on this. We ran a conjoint experiment in 6 countries (AT, CH, DE, DK, ES, SE) where people can choose between 2 social democratic programs. These programs vary on 9 policy dimensions such as pensions, rent control, immigration, climate change, gender equality, inheritance taxation, child care
We then analyze how potential social democratic voters react to these programs react to these programs. We define as SD potentials respondents that say they would potentially ever vote for the SD party in their country (ptv>5) OR self identify as leftwing (lrs<5). These are 53% of our sample.
We find that left and progressive programs are more popular among SD potentials. Culturally conservative positions like strong reduction of immigration make programs much less popular. This strategy that many social democratic parties are currently drawn to reduces support in our analysis.
Among SD potentials, we find less trade-offs based on education and class than often assumed. We find very few issues where a position increases support among one group but reduces it among another. Immigration is an exception where such a trade-off occurs.
We find that more progressive groups (higher educated, SCPs) react more strongly to cultural issues than less progressive groups (low education, working class). They focus more on economic issues. Hence, there are trade-offs on cultural issues, but less progressive positions get punished more. For SD Parties this means that as long as their program is economically to the left, it does not matter much to working class voters what it includes culturally e.g. on immigration. In contrast, educated middle class voters will punish a program for being less culturally progressive.
For age, we find stronger trade-offs where younger voters strongly prefer more progressive programs while older voters reject these. Not surprisingly, an issue where this is very visible is CO2 taxation. But also immigration and integration.
These age trade-offs constitute a dilemma for social democratic parties. In the short run, it is important to appeal to older voters to win elections. However, in doing this they alienate younger voters who build party attachments with more progressive parties. Overall, our findings speak against many common narratives in the media but also among social democratic politicians. Most of all, they contradict the idea that social democratic parties have lost support because they are too progressive on issues such as immigration or gender equality. This is joint work with @siljahausermann.bsky.social @indubioproreto.bsky.social Nadja Mosimann and @markuswagner.bsky.social. You can find the article here: muse.jhu.edu
muse.jhu.edu