According to the recent research, a surge of European populism during the last decade coincides with a collapse of support for social democratic parties, especially by workers as their classical constituency (Rhodes 2013; Rueda 2017). One of the emerging explanations of this the decline of social democratic parties and the rise of right-wing populist parties lies in the effect of labor market dualization. According to this approach, labor market insiders have stable and protected employment whereas outsiders have insecure jobs or no jobs at all. This socio-economic status differentiation translates into political interests’ differentiation. This puts social democratic parties under the pressure to decide whether to pursue policies in favor of insiders or outsiders. Lindvall and Rueda (2013) show that when center-left parties emphasize the interests of insiders, outsiders tend to abandon the political process or vote for radical political parties, but if center-left parties emphasize the interests of outsiders, insiders become more likely to vote for the center-right. Thus, party strategies are important for explaining the decline of social democrats and a surge of populists.
Socioeconomic issues formed the main conflict line of the Czech party system up until 2010. Social Democratic party established as a dominant force of the center-left polling around 30 percent. However, the party started to lose its support since 2010. At the same time, populist parties gained increasing support. The main conflict line has been (partly) rearticulated by other, mostly sociocultural issues, which is usually related to the increasing saliency of issues like migration and sovereignty. In this paper, I focus on the detailed analysis of the decline in the electoral support of the Czech Social Democratic party between 2013 and 2017 national elections; it dropped from 20 to 7 percent. The special attention will be paid to the labor market status and the labor market composition of households. This paper utilizes Czech Household Panel Survey that was fielded every year between 2015 and 2018 and in 2017, it fielded also a telephone follow-up just after the national election. Using a multi-wave panel study allows to directly track the evolution of the party preferences during the election cycle and to test the arguments of the labor market dualization theory of electoral change.
