This chapter summarises the findings of the preceding chapters and puts them in a comparative setting. It reviews the empirical support for the theoretical framework and the party competition argument made in Chapter 2 and addresses the extent to which the developments in the four countries converge and diverge. Rival explanations and developments that seem to diverge from my framework are then discussed.

General expectations and summary of fi ndings

The book's very general point of departure was that social democratic parties that have engaged in recommodifying welfare state reforms risk being punished by the electorate, on the grounds that social democrats have engaged in policies that contradict their traditional social policy stance and their core constituents’ attitudes. Drawing on Esping-Andersen's work (1985, 1990), I argued that social democracy typically formed and aligned a core constituency consisting of manual workers and lower white-collar employees. These classes have few resources and marketable skills and thus demand income replacement in case of invalidity, old age, sickness and unemployment, which is understood as the decommodification of the wage earner. Moreover, they typically benefit from the redistribution of income, given their average below-median incomes. These classes favour generous and universal social security schemes as well as egalitarian policies, which matches the core principles of social democracy as such parties traditionally advocate decommodification and redistribution (Esping-Andersen 1985; Merkel et al. 2008; Huo 2009). As a result, these voters formed lasting alignments with social democratic parties in the post-war era and the Golden Age of the welfare state.

My claim was that these alignments can be upheld as long as social democrats do not break with the decommodifi cation principle in social policy. I maintained that social democrats risk alienating their core constituents if they engage in recommodifying policies, as happened in a couple of countries where social democrats reformed the welfare state under Th ird Way agendas (Dingeldey 2007; Merkel et al. 2008; Huo 2009). The welfare state reforms tightened the eligibility criteria for social security schemes or cut benefi ts. I expected core constituents to punish social democratic parties in elections, because the latter had engaged in policy change that contradicted the attitudes and social policy preferences of the core constituency.