• DOI:10.1017/S0007123410000475
• Corpus ID: 35164074

Third Ways and Social Democracy: The Right Way to Go?

@article{Keman2010ThirdWA,
  title={Third Ways and Social Democracy: The Right Way to Go?},
  author={Hans Keman},
  journal={British Journal of Political Science},
  year={2010},
  volume={41},
  pages={671 - 680}
}

• H. Keman
• Published 21 December 2010
• Political Science, Economics
• British Journal of Political Science

This Research Note investigates the extent to which social democracy has changed in Europe and Australasia as a result of the introduction of the ‘Third Way’. In the next section, I discuss the programmatic change made by social democratic parties with respect to the welfare state and economic management, issues that have always been considered their core business. In the following section, the shift from the ideology of the traditional welfare state to the ideas of the so-called social investment state, as part of the Third Way ideas, will be explored. This change over time (1975–2004) will be measured by means of two scales: one representing the traditional social democratic position on ‘social welfare’; the other indicating the new tendency of social democracy towards ‘social investment’. Indeed, a number of social democratic parties have shifted their policy positions towards what has become known as the ‘Third Way’ and away from their original position as measured by the overall Left–Right scale. Finally, I shall address to what extent this change in ideology has been influenced by the vote-seeking and office-seeking behaviour of social democratic parties. This is intended to explore the question of to what extent the change is a ‘new’ way for leftwing politics or rather implies a movement of social democracy towards the centre or (even) to the right within party systems after 1990. This comparative analysis covers nineteen social democratic parties and their main competitors in: Australia, Austria, Belgium (two parties), Britain, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.