History of social democracy

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. The specific problem is: Cite errors and unused sources need to be resolved. Please help improve this article if you can. (May 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Part of a series on
Social democracy
History Age of Enlightenment Frankfurt Declaration French Revolution Godesberg Program Humanism Internationalist–defencist schism Keynesianism Labor movement Marxism Orthodox Revisionist Nordic model Reformist–revolutionary dispute Socialism Revolutions of 1848 Utopian socialism Welfare capitalism
Concepts Civil liberties Critical theory Democracy Economic Industrial Representative Dirigisme Environmentalism Environmental protection Fair trade Gradualism Institutional abuse Internationalism Land reform Labor rights Left-wing nationalism Mixed economy Nationalization Negative and positive rights Progressivism Reformism Left Socialism Revolutionary socialism Secularism Social corporatism Social justice Social market economy Socialist state Capitalism Socialism Structural abuse Structural violence Trade union Tripartism Welfare Welfare state
Variants Democratic socialism Ethical socialism Evolutionary socialism Liberal socialism Socialism of the 21st century Third Way
People Ambedkar Allende Ardern Attlee Awolowo Batlle y Ordóñez Bebel Ben-Gurion Bernstein Betancourt Bhutto Blair Blanc Brandt Branting Brown Callaghan Cárdenas Clark Craxi Crosland Corbyn Curtin Daszyński Debs Douglas Drees Ebert Ecevit Engels Fraser Gaitskell Gandhi González Goulart Hardie Hilferding İnönü Jaurès Jenkins Jumblatt Junmai Katayama Kautsky Kerensky Kéthly Kirk Lagos Lassalle Layton Lenin Lévesque Liebknecht (father) Liebknecht (son) Luxemburg MacDonald Mandela Marx Myrdal (Alva) Myrdal (Gunnar) Nehru Palme Plekhanov Prodi Russell Radbruch Sánchez Sanders Savage Scholz Stauning Thomas Den Uyl Webb Whitlam Wilson Zhordania
Organizations International Trade Union Confederation International Union of Socialist Youth Party of European Socialists Progressive Alliance Socialist International Young European Socialists Network of Social Democracy in Asia
By region Austria Germany United Kingdom United States
Related Communism "The Internationale" Socialism Types of socialism
Economics portal Politics portal Socialism portal
v t e

Social democracy originated as an ideology within the labour movement whose goals have been a social revolution to promote socialism within democratic processes. In a nonviolent revolution as in the case of evolutionary socialism,^[1] or the establishment and support of a welfare state.^[2] Its origins lie in the 1860s as a revolutionary socialism associated with orthodox Marxism.^[3] Starting in the 1890s, there was a dispute between committed revolutionary social democrats such as Rosa Luxemburg^[4] and reformist social democrats. The latter sided with Marxist revisionists such as Eduard Bernstein, who supported a more gradual approach grounded in liberal democracy and cross-class cooperation.^[5] Karl Kautsky represented a centrist position.^[6] By the 1920s, social democracy became the dominant political tendency, along with communism, within the international socialist movement,^[7] representing a form of democratic socialism with the aim of achieving socialism peacefully.^[8] By the 1910s, social democracy had spread worldwide and transitioned towards advocating an evolutionary change from capitalism to socialism using established political processes such as the parliament.^[8] In the late 1910s, socialist parties committed to revolutionary socialism renamed themselves as communist parties, causing a split in the socialist movement between these supporting the October Revolution and those opposing it.^[9] Social democrats who were opposed to the Bolsheviks later renamed themselves as democratic socialists in order to highlight their differences from communists and later in the 1920s from Marxist–Leninists,^[10] disagreeing with the latter on topics such as their opposition to liberal democracy whilst sharing common ideological roots.^[11]

In the early post-war era, social democrats in Western Europe rejected the Stalinist political and economic model, which was then current in the Soviet Union. They committed themselves either to an alternative path to socialism or to a compromise between capitalism and socialism.^[12] During the post-war period, social democrats embraced the idea of a mixed economy based on the predominance of private property, with only a minority of essential utilities and public services being under public ownership.^[13] As a policy regime, social democracy became associated with Keynesian economics, state interventionism and the welfare state as a way to avoid capitalism's typical crises and to avert or prevent mass unemployment,^[14] without abolishing factor markets, private property and wage labour.^[15] With the rise in popularity of neoliberalism and the New Right by the 1980s,^[16] many social democratic parties incorporated the Third Way ideology,^[17] aiming to fuse economic liberalism with social democratic welfare policies.^[18] By the 2010s, social democratic parties that accepted triangulation and the neoliberal^[19] shift in policies such as austerity, deregulation, free trade, privatization and welfare reforms such as workfare, experienced a drastic decline.^[20] The Third Way largely fell out of favour in a phenomenon known as Pasokification.^[21] Scholars have linked the decline of social democratic parties to the declining number of industrial workers, greater economic prosperity of voters and a tendency for these parties to shift from the left to the centre on economic issues. They alienated their former base of supporters and voters in the process. This decline has been matched by increased support for more left-wing and left-wing populist parties, as well as for Left and Green social democratic parties that reject neoliberal and Third Way policies.^[22]

Social democracy was highly influential throughout the 20th century.^[23] Starting in the 1920s and 1930s, with the aftermath of World War I and that of the Great Depression, social democrats were elected to power.^[24] In countries such as Britain, Germany and Sweden, social democrats passed social reforms and adopted proto-Keynesian approaches that would be promoted across the Western world in the post-war period, lasting until the 1970s and 1990s.^[25] Academics, political commentators and other scholars tend to distinguish between authoritarian socialist and democratic socialist states, with the first representing the Soviet Bloc and the latter representing Western Bloc countries which have been democratically governed by socialist parties such as Britain, France, Sweden and Western social democracies in general, among others.^[26] Social democracy has been criticized by both the left and right. The left criticizes social democracy for having betrayed the working class during World War I and for playing a role in the failure of the proletarian 1917–1924 revolutionary wave. It further accuses social democrats of having abandoned socialism.^[27] Conversely, one critique of the right is mainly related to their criticism of welfare. Another criticism concerns the compatibility of democracy and socialism.^[28]