Social Democracy in Competition: Voting Propensities and Electoral Trade-offsSilja Häusermann
14 January 2021
Silja Häusermann (University of Zurich), 17:15 - 18:45 CET, presents her project in the Interdisciplinary Research Seminar of the GRK "Collective Decision-Making”.
This seminar will take place as a Zoom meeting. Please send (if you haven’t already) an email to cdm.wiso@uni-hamburg.de if you want to register for the seminar. We invite everyone interested to attend!
Abstract
In the light of declining vote shares across Western Europe, the question how social democratic parties could attract voters through particular programmatic appeals has gained massive academic and political attention. However, each of the possible programmatic choices might potentially entail both voter gains, but also voter losses.
My talk will draw on two papers from an ongoing wider research project, one using observational data and one using a conjoint experiment. First, I use EES 2014 and 2019 data on individual voting propensities in 11 West European countries to evaluate these potential gains and losses and to identify winning, losing and trade-off strategies. Across time and countries, I find Cultural Liberalism and Economic Leftism to be the most promising strategies, with high potential gains from green and radical left parties and on average lower potential losses to the right, in particular to the radical right. Conversely, I find Left National-Conservatism to likely be a losing strategy in most countries, with much less to be gained from radical right electorates than to be lost at the other end of the spectrum to green or radical left parties. The prospects of a Centrist strategy appear more variable across countries.