[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, this is Feb Stoog, the podcast series of the Foundation for European Progressive Studies. My name is Laslo Andor. I'm the Secretary General of Feb's. And today I have a pleasure, which is to welcome Professor Jonas Pontuson to discuss the state of social democracy, especially in Europe.
I'm stressing Europe because if you have seen the CV of Professor Pontuson, you know that before his current position, which is at the University of Geneva, he was associated with universities in the United States for a long period Cornell University and subsequently Princeton. But through these decades, he made his name as a scholar on European social democracy with a long list of publications.
And if you read the recent ones, I think the term which is the need for a social democratic renewal is something which often appears. And I'm sure that if there was a recipe for such a social democratic renewal, there would be a huge demand, a huge interest, in finding out what this recipe is. But Professor Pontuson, would you like to speak about some of the key ingredients, what you consider to be important for a social democratic renewal? Yes, thank you.
Thank you first for having me. I perhaps should not-- I don't think I have a recipe for-- or I have a kind of a vision. And I definitely think social democratic renewal is called for. It's not hard to say that. Or it's not all-- it's quite clear that social democratic parties are very much struggling today. I don't have a recipe. And in some sense, I wrote this essay, which is the basis of what I will talk about today.
And in that paper or that essay, I'm kind of implicitly engaging critically with a series of political science work that has been done recently, which has focused very much on party programs and kind of striking the right balance, appealing to different kinds of electoral constituencies, progressive middle class voters, working class voters, and kind of trying to minimize trade-offs. And I'm somewhat critical of focusing on party programs and what parties say in elections.
I don't think that voters read party programs. I don't think they necessarily decide how to vote based on particular policy issues and trying to maximize their policy preferences, in some sense. I think there are, as other political scientists have argued, there are other considerations. One has to do with long-term partisan identity or identification. And there, I think trade unions have long been a key factor that has made people want to vote for social democratic parties.
I also think that the issue of what's important in terms of crises or salient political issues, who sets the terms of the political debate, becomes important and obviously likable and competent leaders. So I want to kind of de-emphasize finding the right program. Or I'm not sure that's the most important challenge confronting social democracy. I am interested in what social democrats have done in government, not just in the last government, but over an extended period of time.
And I believe that at least in Sweden, social democratic governments have not delivered very much for their working class constituents since the 1980s. I'm also interested in the decline of unions as a kind of social force that has helped, historically, has helped social democrats mobilize.
And finally, and perhaps least clear in this essay, at least, is something to do with who are the candidates who are running for office as social democrats and a kind of professionalization of politics. And who is it that talks for social democrats who pretends or who wants to talk for their working class? And what do they-- or how do they talk about these issues?
So in some sense, the thrust of what I want to argue is that the problems of social democracy, they are programmatic in part, but they are actually much bigger problems than that. And getting the right program, I think, is not what we should be focusing on.
We should worry about-- and it's really striking to me that social democrats have not worried very much at all, I think, over the last 20, 30 years about building unions or preventing de-unionization, creating incentives for people to be union members. And so it's the movement quality of the social democracy, I think, as much as the programmatic circumstances that lies at the source of the problem.
It's very interesting because if you stress the importance of a movement, a social movement behind social democracy, the erosion of this is probably not new. I think already in the 1990s, you wrote about a decline of social democracy. Maybe not everybody did that. So the question would be, what drove you in the 1990s to studying the decline of social democracy? And what was what you spotted? And maybe other people didn't notice at that time.
So I actually think-- so I wrote a couple of articles. They were written in the first half of the 1990s. And they were inspired by-- so I think the decline of social democracy began, as you say, earlier in the '70s, and especially in the '80s, where the problems began. So that's a kind of a first phase. Then we get this moment, we could call it the third way, social democracy moment, when social democratic parties seem to have renewed themselves.
I'm talking about new labor, and in particular, of course, but in Sweden and in Germany as well. And they win elections. And we have a kind of-- we have a revival. We have that happened roughly between the Swedish social democrats come back into power in 1994. And I think that period of revival, let's call it, lasts about until 2010 when new labor loses power. And so my early articles, in some sense, were about the first phase. And I wouldn't have written them in the early 2000s.
I think at that time, quite a few people were actually writing about problems or challenges and decline of social democracy. And then that went away once we had these electoral victories. But the decline is kind of long term, I think. And certainly, I was then and remain concerned about de-unionization, which is clearly not so much in Sweden, but in many other countries, a process which begins already in the late 1970s or so.
I'm also, perhaps, excessively so Swedish and tricky, even though I haven't lived there for a long time. But it is my home country. And it's probably the Social Democratic Party that I know best. And they had a really bad election in 1981. I mean, this was a disastrous election. At that time seemed like the worst election that had happened for a very long time. Not coincidentally, an election in which we had the first right wing populist party emerge.
They were called the Swedish democracy or something like that. They disappeared, but then reappeared in a different guise with the Sweden Democrats. And as I talk about in this essay and have talked about elsewhere, the Swedes were doing a kind of third way policies in the 1980s, at least in the domain of economic policy. And they didn't pay off those policies.
So in an interesting way, I think, the experience of Sweden in the '80s and the defeat in 1981-- sorry, 1991-- anticipates some of what will then happen with third way social democracy, with large on the European stage, both in terms of the policies that were implemented, but also in terms of the negative electoral consequences.
But I think, yeah, it is clearly not-- especially if you look at it from a more sociological point of view-- trade union, size of the working class, et cetera. This is a continuation of some-- what we have seen since 2010 is a continuation of something that we saw pre-1997 or something like that. As you mentioned, Sweden, I should have a follow-up question about this, because if you look at the recent experience, the Swedish social democrats completed two cycles in government.
And after the recent election, they went into opposition, but they still the strongest party and quite resilient. Is there some know-how here? Is there a kind of important feature of this strong position which others should pay attention to and learn from? So I guess I want to say-- well, there are two things here, I think. One is the Swedish model as a set of policies or as a societal project. I can talk about that. The other is the electoral performance of the social democrats.
And you should note, or we should note, that the election of 2018 in terms of national vote share was the worst election the Swedish social democrats have had since the introduction of universal suffrage. Their vote share, and in fact, the vote share of the left as a whole, Greens and radical left included, was lower in 2018 than it had been for the previous 50 years or so.
So yes, resilient in the sense that the vote share is still in the upper half of the 20%, they recovered slightly or the social democrats, I think, they gained one or two percentage points in the last election. Clearly, the last election was not a big shift from the left to the right in Sweden. It was a shift inside the right and the growth of the right wing populist party as the now biggest non-left party in Sweden.
And as a result of that, the two centrist parties, liberals and center, changed their mind and decided that they would be willing to govern with the implicit support of the right wing populists, which they could have done in 2018 and indeed could have done in 2014 as well. But at that time, the center parties were unwilling to opt. They preferred a minority social democratic government.
So in terms of electoral resilience, yes, it's not nearly as bad as the French socialists, for instance. But we are now at a Swiss level of electoral support, I believe. So the Swiss Socialist Party seemed, I believe, a peak, their vote share, peaked in the late 20s and has stayed more or less between 25 and 28, 29% of the vote share. And now the Swedish social democrats are roughly at the same level and can probably stay at that level without doing much revival at all.
But that puts them in a-- that they have simply lost, I think, the kind of the pivotal or dominant place which they enjoyed as late as the 1990s. I would like you to elaborate a little bit on the sociology of social democracy, namely the connection between social democratic parties and the working class.
This is something which a lot of scholars pay attention to, either in the sense of studying the changing class composition of Western societies and the consequences of that on the power of social democracy, or the fact or assumption-- it's up to you to decide-- that increasingly, parts of the working class shift from social democracy to so-called right-wing populist parties or various other types of populist parties not necessarily right-wing.
Do you agree with these trends to be kind of important or even dominant in our time? Yeah, so I think that in terms of the losses that social democratic parties have suffered since the early 2000s or since 2009, 10 or thereabouts, have been predominantly working class voters that have abandoned them. The working class has also shrunk, but how much it has shrunk depends very much on what we mean by the-- or how we conceive of the working class.
And I certainly don't think we should focus only on manual production workers. There is obviously a large part of the working class which falls into the category of service workers of some form or another. Perhaps we could call them white collar, though at least in the Swedish context that tends to mean something else. So the class has shrunk, but it hasn't shrunk. I think that social democrats in the third way were thinking of the working class as manual workers, production workers.
They were shrinking rapidly. There were new strata of relatively educated white collar workers, teachers, et cetera, who could be mobilized and in fact were mobilized in the 90s and 2000s around various kinds of non-economic issues. And I think social democrats at that time at least thought that the old working class constituency was small, relatively small, shrinking rapidly, and that these other constituencies were growing rapidly.
And I guess, and we're not going to get into the measurements of these things right now, but I think the size of the working class was probably underestimated on the one hand. And on the other hand, the growth and the loyalty of these new, sometimes referred to as socio cultural professionals, the size of that group was not nearly as big as, or wasn't growing as fast as we expected.
I think that the losses have been working class losses primarily since or the gains among these news strata progressive middle class voters were not as big as the losses have not been as big as the losses among working class.
So I think that the working class is crucial here and the question of course becomes, I think for a lot of people, the working class turned racist nativist and abandoned the left or abandoned the social democrats and and I guess, I think perhaps the social democrats abandoned them as much or that there is another part of this story.
I think that the lack of emphasis on redistributive policies in a period of rapidly growing inequality in the 1990s and 2000s in when social democrats were in power and I have some figures on this in my essay. They actually, they did. Not only did they fail to compensate. Certainly this is true of the German social democrats 98 to 2006.
It is also true of the Swedish social democrats 94 to 2006. Not only did they not compensate for growing market inequalities, but they actually the reforms of the welfare state that they undertook actually increased had a had that contributed to rising inequality. The other thing I want to say about working class voters is that they are not.
If the choice was simply between social democrats and send and mainstream center right parties. The evidence that I can see at least is that they are as likely to choose social democrats relative to mainstream center right parties today as they were 20 30 years ago. The difference is that now they're also likely to choose right wing or populist parties and in particular right wing populist parties. This is also true for trade union members.
And, or they will abstain. So, so the abstention has become an option and voting for anti system or protest parties have become an option. And I think that's partly because let's put it this way. If you are a working class person and especially perhaps and this is something we could talk about if you live in towns or rural areas that are that have fallen behind.
And if all the other parties, including the social democrats are telling you that we cannot afford to expand the welfare state redistribution has to be either de emphasized in favor of a do investment in education, or, and, or at least it has to be postponed until some point.
Maybe it's quite rational to say protectionism welfare chauvinism are solutions to my problems, which, which because I'm told that there is no other there that the traditional social democratic solutions to these problems are no longer available or workable.
And I also here want to say one more thing I guess in the 1970s and in the 1980s, or certainly in the 70s in most European countries, the issue of industrial democracy or workplace rights and workplace conditions was an important issue, which helped the social democrats I think it was an issue that appealed to working class voters but it was also an issue that appealed to middle class voters who were not happy with their working conditions and who wanted to change society in some way.
And it is very striking, I think that that we have not heard much about industrial democracy, let alone economic democracy and wage on our funds and, and things like that. The fact that we're, we're not talking about, I think the social democrats stopped talking about those issues. And in, and in so doing, and also stopped practicing redistribution when they were in government and in so doing, they kind of opened up a new space where these populist forces have have very much benefited from.
And it's very interesting that you mentioned redistribution and the importance of economic democracy or industrial democracy, because the other trend which, you know, various authors highlight is the impact of digitalization and technological change, which gives rise to the platform economy, and consequently, what we call the precarious. Yeah, do you think this is a kind of substantial sociological change with an impact on the political representation.
Yeah, absolutely, no, absolutely. And one of my new research projects has to do with the fact that, and we see this very clearly, the fact that the unemployment insurance or the social protection systems that have been in place and that social democrats have created,
did create once upon a time but have now kind of retrenched or fiddled with or contributed. I don't think they're the only ones responsible for that but, but there are a lot of workers or there are a lot of people in whose earnings are towards the bottom of the income distribution, who simply no longer have enough work history to qualify for full unemployment benefits.
And, and, and who therefore in some sense fall outside the social protection system for working people and I think that that is a, so that so kind of, and this could partly be about re, re regulating employment contracts restricting the capacity of
the government to offer fixed term contracts, ensuring that people have longer work histories, or reforming the, the insurance system in ways that make taxi work histories less relevant to the benefits that you receive and in that sense I suppose, I don't want to talk about basic minimum
but clearly we need these welfare states need and I think everybody recognizes this now that these welfare states need to be reformed to take into account the kind of the fact that people are no longer in stable jobs for as long periods of time. I'm not mentioning this because one of the important endeavors at least at the level is that the European Union should actually support unemployment benefit schemes.
Right, so it's some kind of reinsurance has been already on the horizon for some time and in this way, I think the EU could make itself very useful. In reality, when I would like to take you is the question of what's happening at the grassroots today, because you know the labor movement is always the sociological basis historically for social democracy.
And, and sometimes is too much attention to just the political analysis which is, you know, the surface region, the surface and, and, and the tip of the iceberg. Then the question is, you know, what's happening underneath with the social movements with the activism at the workplaces but also outside the workplaces, which eventually would provide the the inspiration and also the power for progressive politics and especially socialist. I'm very glad you bring this up.
I want to say one thing about trade unions, at least in Sweden, one of the things that we've seen not only have they lost members, but as the public protection system has deteriorated, fewer people are eligible for unemployment insurance. And the replacement rate in unemployment insurance has gone down. Trade unions have tried to survive by offering private benefits by offering supplementary insurance benefits in Sweden.
And that's become an especially because increasingly white collar unions compete between each other. And there is some competition between blue collar and white collar unions union density remains pretty high, but unions have become more kind of self interested organizations or organizations that are appealing to members self interest. And the result union members are perhaps less likely to identify as being left than they once were.
So that's, and I'm really struck in the Swedish case by the fact that you mentioned in an email that Finnish unions are currently striking against the government's welfare policies, or wealth proposal welfare reforms and I think that's an interesting thing. And I'm struck by the fact that Swedish unions which have been very critical of government policy, especially under the bourgeois governments but also under social democratic governments.
They have not over the last 20 years engaged in political strikes or political action in this in a more militant fashion. And I think that what the Finnish unions are doing is, is the beginning or is part of a larger kind of, in a certain way I think labor militants and trade unionists are increasingly saying, you know, we can't depend on the social Democrats.
They're not winning elections and if they're winning elections they don't necessarily do what we want them to do. And we have to take more quote unquote direct action and, and I think that is a kind of bottom up movement which is perhaps a source of optimism. We've also seen in Sweden though that's the strike around Tesla and, and collective bargaining rights. It's not obvious that that strike is going terribly well.
But, but it's ongoing and I think that we see trade unions being willing to engage in more, let's say more militant action. Also, obviously in the United States in the auto sector or we've seen much more labor militants the unemployment is at a all time low in many countries and which which gives workers more confidence in in in and and this I think it becomes.
I don't think we can perhaps social Democratic parties will, in some sense, be followers to some extent or I don't think that we can really. I think we have to think that there are other things. It's not just the rhetoric or the project of social Democratic parties, but there is some, there is movement changes that would need social Democratic revival would require initiatives not only by social Democratic parties, but also by societal activists and and and I think
there's some hope there that things are turning around and one of the things that I don't know enough about this or I don't think we know enough about this but then the question becomes these working class voters or people who turned towards right wing populists, are they can they be mobilized my guess is that they can that that it that that if you look at the US for instance my guess is that there are Trump voters who who participated in in the U.
W strikes for instance, and that there is something about labor militancy that that could that could appeal to these voters in a way that perhaps social Democratic party programs cannot at the present. I think we returned to the point where we started, which is to discuss the social Democratic renewal.
I think you, you enrich this discussion by these very important references to the grassroot movements, because at the end of the day, indeed, the bottom up activities, the movements of workers will energize the progressive politics in European
countries, which also beyond, and even if you know some of the statistics are not that bad like you know unemployment is not that high in most countries, the employment rates have been improved, but at the same time inequality has increased, and the working conditions for many, especially in some of the new sectors in the gig economy are indeed a matter of great concern. And if, if the social democracy cannot respond forcefully to these phenomena.
Of course, it would be no surprise if a decline occurs, but I think, you know, this has been not only discussed but also put into the center of electoral programs at the national level but also the European level. And that needs to be indeed pushed forward as forcefully as possible. I could not agree with you more.
Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much for your analysis. And indeed, we look forward to discussing these important issues with you also at a later stage. And thanks to listeners for their attention. Goodbye. Thank you. .