Conditions of Social Democratic Failure in Post-Communist East Central Europe: a Set-Theoretical Exploration of Competing Explanations

Social democratic parties were among the most successful West European party families in (re-)established across East Central Europe after 1989 and were seen as the key pillars of democratic change in the region, reconciling the demands of market-led modernisation and EU integration with the need to protect vulnerable groups and defend peripheral national economies. However, as elsewhere in Europe, many ECE social democratic parties appear to be in sharp, perhaps terminal, decline. Their decline is often subsumed into a discussion of broader global trends afflicting mainstream parties or a narrative of social democratic decline centring on the experience of West European social democratic parties. These typically stress long-term social, demographic and technological changes in advanced post-industrial societies against a backdrop of globalisation and Europeanisation; the growing importance of (cross-cutting) socio-cultural cleavages; and the consequent transformation of social democratic parties and rise of challenger parties, both left-libertarian and radical right-wing populist (latterly radical left populist). However, the specific origins and character of ECE social democratic parties – often, but not always, as communist successor parties – and the distinct trajectory of the ECE region overall would lead us to expect general trends to be overlaid with patterns of causation internal to the region. There was also been significant temporal and cross-national variation in the fortunes of ECE social democratic parties, particularly concerning the timing, suddenness and extent of electoral collapse, which is difficult to explain in generic terms. This is recognised in several bodies of region-specific work including the large comparative literature on Communist successor parties (CSPs) and smaller bodies of work on socialist and social democratic parties. Taking ‘electoral collapse’ in critical elections as the key outcome, the paper uses Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to frame and test explanations of social democratic parties’ in set-theoretic terms in 10 ECE states: that ECE social democratic parties have suffered a variant of Western European pattern of parallel competition from left-liberals and/or market-sceptical nationalists; that they suffered from ECE voters’ rejection of (repeat) incumbents, which affected all post-1989 mainstream parties; that corruption and bad governance undermined a distinct appeal based on managerial competence; or that they were undermined by excessive economic (neo-)liberalism and/or austerity, especially in the aftermath of the Great Recession. As the ‘social democraticness’ of (some) self-declared social democratic parties in ECE is questioned in parts of the literature, the analysis also considers key conditions seen as compromising or qualifying the extent of social democratic identity such as parties embrace of nationalism and/or social conservatism; extent of patronage networks; and degree of populism.