Whatever happened to East European social democracy? A set theoretical analysis of social democratic failure in post-communist Europe 1990-2020

Social democratic parties were among the most successful West European party families (re-)established across Central and South Eastern Europe (CSEE) after 1989 and were once seen as a key pillar of democratic change in the region, reconciling the demands of market-led modernisation with the need to protect vulnerable groups and defend peripheral national economies. However, as elsewhere in Europe, many CSEE social democratic parties are either in sharp decline, or have vanished as major political players, in some instances paving the way for democratic backsliding. Despite a huge comparative literature on West European social democratic decline and a well-developed earlier literature on the transformation of East European Communist successor parties (CSPs), systematic comparison of the decline and demise social democratic parties in Central and South Eastern Europe has been lacking. Often, the eclipse of the centre-left in the region has been subsumed into Western European-centric accounts of social democratic decline, foregrounding long-term socio-economic and demographic changes in advanced post-industrial societies and the rise of once fringe left-libertarian and radical right-wing populist (latterly radical left populist) challenger parties in West European party systems. With some exceptions, work focusing on CSEE social democracy has been confined to broad surveys or studies (over) stressing the experience of the social democratic centre-left in Poland and Hungary. This paper systematises and synthesises explanations of social democratic party failure in the literature and tests them across ten cases in Central and SE Europe across the period 1990-2020. Conceptualising failure as electoral collapse without significant subsequent recovery, it synthesizes explanations in the literature, identifying a range of causal stories: that CSEE 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, affecting all 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. The paper uses the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) technique of ‘configurational comparison’ to identify (possibly differing) causal paths of countries and sub-regions leading to most marked social democratic party failure in CSEE. Here, it finds two sufficient casual paths, which broadly support the arguments of Grzymala-Busse (2019): that social democratic parties failed where they make early technocratic appeals that rapidly faded combined 1) either with relatively high levels of cultural liberalism or 2) with high levels of corruption when in office. Conversely, it finds that the ‘non-failure’ of the small numbers of more enduring and successful self-styled CSCEE social democratic parties is best explained by the absence of technocratic appeal combined with high levels of corruption. From the cases covered (Albania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia), this may be interpretable in terms of patronage politics. Such findings are unexpected in that levels of economic (neo-) liberalism does not feature in the casual solutions identified, despite appearing relevant in earlier work on apparently paradigmatic cases of social democratic failure in Poland and Hungary.