| Resumen: |
The purpose of this paper is to weigh up these differing views regarding the fate of European Social Democracy and to understand the electoral dynamics underpinning the movement over a period of 150 years. Is European Social Democracy demonstrating a marked capacity to resist, a “longevity which one can"t help but admire” (Escalona, 2018: 2), is it undergoing the “slight decline” mentioned at the start of the 2008 economic and financial crisis (Moschonas, 2011) or does the state in which it currently finds itself herald the end of its life cycle? One can examine this issue from several angles, using any number of indicators. Insofar as we are interested in the fate of the parties, we have looked at the voting variable. Without excluding other factors, it provides the clearest indication of the situation in which the party or family of parties finds itself and refers to two key elements in the salience of a party as picked out by Sartori (1976). A crucial indicator in any parliamentary democracy, it is all the more fundamental when one considers that the funding of political parties is intimately linked to how they perform in the polls (Katz & Mair, 1995). Moreover, voting data have the advantage of allowing a sufficiently robust comparison to be made between parties and timeframes. Nevertheless, there are also conflicting interpretations when it comes to how to analyse electoral data. Benedetto, Hix and Mastrorocco (2020) recently set out a vision of the electoral path for European Social Democracy. It throws up some problems which do not allow us fully to chart the electoral history of this political family. This paper suggests taking a more wide-ranging view, particularly in terms of time, and adopting different methods when it comes to describing how things have developed and changed. |
