Introduction

The current crisis of capitalism should provide a major opportunity for social democracy, yet, at the time of writing, there are very few left-of-centre parties in power in Western Europe. Those in Portugal, Greece and Spain were swept away by the crisis of the Euro. In Scandinavia, the heartland of social democracy, Norway has a centre-left government, in coalition with Socialist Left and the Centre Party, while Denmark has a social democrat-led government, but with a mere quarter of the popular vote. Sweden and Finland have centre-right coalition governments. Broadly speaking, the percentages of the vote obtained by social democratic parties in these historic heartlands are the lowest for decades. Elsewhere in Western Europe, the Labour government in the UK lost power in May 2010, and most social democratic parties are in opposition. In Central and Eastern Europe, as Milada Vachudova discusses, social democracy has not prospered.

In this chapter we review electoral trends, focusing on Western Europe because that is the historic heartland of social democracy. While there is an argument for saying that only the Nordic countries are ‘proper’ social democracies (see Rothstein and Steinmo in this volume), to us that seems unduly restrictive given that socialist/labour parties have been prominent across Europe since 1945. While it is true that they have not been as hegemonic as in the Nordic countries, they still draw upon diverse social and economic policies which are social democratic.