In this session, Jane Gingrich (Oxford) will present her forthcoming book analysing the electoral decline of social democratic parties through the lens of policy feedback theory. Relatedly, Manuel Alvariño (CBS - Copenhagen Business School) will present a work-in-progress book project on why conservative parties have increasingly adopted progressive family policies in male-breadwinner welfare states.
'Third Way Policies, Political Feedbacks, and the Decline of Social Democratic Parties'
Speaker: Jane Gingrich, University of Oxford
This book examines why social democratic parties have experienced declining support across advanced democracies despite sustained public backing for many of their core economic principles. Existing explanations emphasise either structural transformations in the economy or internal party choices such as third way ideological moderation. I argue that neither perspective sufficiently explains the erosion of social democrats’ cross-class coalitions. Instead, the book develops a theory of strategic feedback effects, showing how the policy and organisational choices of the 1990s–2000s reshaped, and ultimately weakened, the electoral coalitions these parties once relied on. Third way strategies, including education-focused social investment, technocratic redistribution, and market-oriented public service reform, were designed to appeal to new middle-class voters while compensating workers. While these policies sometimes reinforced support for themselves, they generated weaker political feedback, failing to anchor beneficiaries to the social democratic left, leaving a more competitive field. Drawing on cross-national data, the book demonstrates how these weakened feedback loops contributed to fragmentation, realignment, and the rise of new competitors.
'Enduring Equality: How family policies transformed conservatives and prevented backlash'
Speaker: Manuel Alvariño, Copenhagen Business School
This book explains why some social rights survive and even expand under the rule of parties that once opposed them. This also unveils new policy mechanisms through which political parties influence what other parties do. It studies the case of the politics of gender and family policy in Western Europe, where many centre-right and even some radical right parties have shifted away from the male-breadwinner ideal to support policies that redistribute care responsibilities and foster employment opportunities for mothers. The book argues that this unexpected transformation is the result of policy feedback effects set in motion if progressive parties win political power and establish pioneering work-family rights. These reforms build constituencies of working parents that right-wing parties try to compete for electorally, while also generating economic benefits that feed ideational change among employers and party experts. In contrast to other policies with small political impact or distributive conflict, the capacity of work-family policies to generate positive sum gains across diverse actors enables their diffusion across parties and the consolidation of women's economic emancipation.
The book draws on a new reform database and in-depth comparative studies of six countries in Western Europe to trace what enables left-wing parties to establish pioneering robust workfamily rights, and why these embed new norms that centre-right parties eventually adopt. This was the case in Germany and Spain, but cabinet insecurity and interministerial compromises hindered them in Italy and Austria respectively, leaving conservative parties unconstrained to sustain traditionalist agendas. Sustained social-democratic hegemony in Denmark, in contrast to Finland, accumulated into robust legacies that push the radical right to embrace work-family rights as a symbol of national pride. Taken together, the book offers ideas about how to constrain conservative backlash, it shows how policy feedback works for understudied social investment programmes, and it contributes to understanding the changing party politics of welfare reform in the era of post-industrial economies and demographic challenges
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