The Electoral Consequences of Welfare State Reforms for the Danish Social Democrats
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Christoph Arndt
Abstract
The article demonstrates that the big electoral defeat for Danish social democracy in the 2001 elections was not solely the consequence of the immigration issue, but of the welfare state reforms implemented by the Social Democratic government (1993–2001). Social democratic core voters opposed the reforms since they broke with the decommodification paradigm and turned away from social democracy. Against the arguments from the literature, the left-wing competitor Socialist People’s Party’s could not benefit from the reforms given its function as supporter party. Rather, the reforms caused the realignment of social democratic core voters with the Liberals and the Danish People’s Party having expanded their voter base in 2001 as a consequence of the welfare reforms.
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This does not exclude that other parties, also parties of the centre-right, had occasionally supported the expansion of the welfare state and implemented universality principles in the Danish welfare state when holding office.
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This section draws on the works of e.g., Goul Andersen 2002; Green-Pedersen 2002a, 2002b: p. 74ff; Merkel et al. 2008: p. 201; Clasen and Clegg 2007. For a more detailed analysis of the reforms, see Arndt (2013, chapter 6).
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The results for Venstre differ significantly for the welfare attitudes (that is between the left and right-hand side), but not for the immigration issue, though.
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I performed similar analyses with data for the 2005 election. These yield that the DF has kept these voters to a very strong degree as the party kept more than 85% of their voters from the social democratic core voter base and there are only marginal losses to the SD.
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Article note: This article draws partly on Chapter 6 of my book “The Electoral Consequences of Third Way Welfare State Reforms,” published at Amsterdam University Press in 2013. I thank Amsterdam University Press for the permission to reuse material from Chapter 6 of the book.
©2013 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Article
- The Production of Institutional Facts in Economic Discourse
- Different Paths of Transitional Justice in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland
- Homo Politicus – Towards a Theory of Political Action and Motivation
- Global Victimhood: On the Charisma of the Victim in Transitional Justice Processes
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