Socio-structural change has led to important shifts in the electorate of social-democratic parties, as middle class voters increasingly vote for the left and working class voters increasingly vote for the populist right. Much of the literature on the subsequent voter-party realignment has focused on the socio-cultural conflict dimension of party competition. However, have Social-democratic parties also realigned their economic policy programs to the preferences of their new voters? Can their – sometimes unexpected – policy positions (e.g. in favor of welfare reform) be explained by such economic realignment?
The existing literature doubts economic realignment by pointing to the rise of issue voting, the overriding importance of socio-cultural conflicts and the supposed convergence of parties on socio-economic issues under the constraints of globalization or austerity. However, hardly any study has actually investigated empirically how the socio-structural electorates have changed and to what extent Social Democratic parties have consequently adapted their programmatic position (e.g. by stressing different positions or different aspects of welfare policy, such as social investment instead of redistribution). This is what I do in this paper. The analysis focuses particularly on the specific situation of a dilemma in which Social Democratic parties may be caught if the new core voters have different economic preferences form the old core voters. I expect that in these cases, party competition explains realignment: Parties align with those sub-electorates who are most competed for by other parties.
Empirically, I focus on voter preferences and party positions on labour market policies in Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK. I use two sources of data: survey data from the ESS and ISSP projects and a newly compiled data set on party positions during several electoral campaigns (coded data from newspaper analysis).
