THE RISE OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY (†)

Carles Boix (‡)

February 23, 2011

This chapter explores the rise of social democratic parties in the earlier decades of the 20th century,

focusing on the divergent fortunes of socialism in France, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

The paper first exploits district-level data and employs EI techniques to determine the geographical

distribution and social basis of support of socialist parties before and after World War One. It then

discusses the two main events that made the rise of electoral socialism possible in advanced democracies:

the extension of the suffrage and the decision of trade unions to stop endorsing Liberal candidates.

Besides shedding light on the process of party system formation in advanced democracies, the paper

makes a contribution to the background conditions that triggered the adoption of PR.

† A previous version of this chapter was presented in the Conference in honor of José María Maravall, 14-

15 June 2010, Madrid and the American Political Science Association Meetings in Washington, D.C.,

September 2011. I thanks the comments of the participants and in particular those of Pablo Beramendi. I

am grateful to Mehvesh Mumtaz Ahmed for her research assistance.

‡ Princeton University, cboix@princeton.edu.

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Jointly with Christian democratic parties, social democracy has arguably been the most successful

electoral machine in advanced democracies since its inception over one hundred years ago. The story is

told in a transparent manner by Figure 1, which shows the percentage of votes won by social democratic

parties in all the democratically contested elections in the industrialized world (Western Europe, North

America, Australia and New Zealand) from 1871 (the first election with socialist candidates in Germany)

until 1997 as well as a smoothed lowess line (unweighted by country size) over time.

[Figure 1 here]

Once social democratic parties, that is, that fraction of the socialist movement that put aside the

principle of revolutionary violence to take power, decided to employ “paper stones” (Przeworski and

Sprague 1986) in the late nineteenth century, they grew quickly in electoral support. Their vote share was

close to 30 percent in the early 1920s. In Australia, Austria, New Zealand and the Scandinavian area they

received around half of the ballots by the end of the interwar period. In continental Europe their support

peaked at about one third of the vote in the 1930s. But the overall performance of the Left was comparable

to the more successful labor parties once we include the vote for communist parties. In Germany the SPD

and the KDP gathered 41.6 percent of the vote in 1920. In France the Popular Front garnered 42.7 percent

in 1936. The share of social democratic vote inched up a bit after World War Two and then stabilized over

the following decades. In spite of repeated predictions about the decline and eventual fall of electoral

socialism due to a thawing class cleavage, the disappearance of blue-collar workers, the emergence of

post-materialist values and/or globalization (Kitschelt 1994, Inglehart 1971, 1977), social democratic

parties still obtain over 40 percent of the votes in most European countries and continue to lead in terms

of sheer number of parliamentary governments they preside over. More important, their key political

legacy, the welfare state, remains in place unquestioned, supported by strong electoral majorities (Alesina,

Glaeser and Sacerdote 2001).

Both the political foundations and the electoral rise of social democracy have already been the

object of several pathbreaking studies (Lipset and Rokkan 1968; Katznelson and Zolberg 1986; Przeworski

and Sprague 1986; Bartolini 2000). Nonetheless, all those contributions are limited by important

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methodological constraints. Since electoral surveys were not conducted in a systematic manner until the

1960s, they only rely on aggregate data. Yet, given Robinson’s critique of the ecological inference method

(Robinson 1950), initially suggested to derive individual behavior from data gathered at the district or

country level, their analysis was circumscribed to the discussion of national time trends and, to some

extent, patterns of regional and geographical variation. 1 As a result, our knowledge about the stability of

partisan electorates, voting flows across parties, the social and religious composition of the socialist

electorate, and the causes underlying its growth before the middle of the twentieth century is still

precarious.

Taking advantage of the new methods of >ecological inference= proposed by King (1997) and

blending them with the use of more historical material, here I revisit the rise of social democracy that took

place in the industrialized world between 1870 and 1940. That analysis proceeds in two steps or parts. The

first part examines the emergence and consolidation of socialist parties in France, Germany, Sweden and

the United Kingdom employing two kinds of evidence. On the one hand, it estimates the stability of each

party=s electorate over elections: this involves the analysis of flows across parties and between voters and

non-voters. On the other hand, it examines, for selected points in time (before and after World War One),

the social composition of the electorate: this implies estimating the proportion of each party=s voters

according to class and, for Germany, religion. The empirical analysis shows that social democratic parties

were strict working-class parties and that they grew after the introduction of universal suffrage and at the

expense of urban liberal parties.

The second part of the chapter locates those empirical findings in the context of the strategic and

institutional choices made by liberal politicians, social democratic parties and unions. Overall, it shows

that the growth of socialist parties resulted from the combination of two factors: a broader and changing

electorate and the incapacity of liberal incumbents to retain any blue-collar support after trade unions

decided to sponsor socialist candidates. The introduction of universal male suffrage undermined the

1 Robinson showed ecological regression to be highly susceptible to >aggregation bias=, that is, to generate substantial disparities between results obtained at the aggregated and individual levels of analysis, for two reasons: first, groupings of individuals may produce specification errors in aggregate estimates; alternatively, grouping of individuals may alter the relative variance of independent and dependent variables. For a review of >ecological inference= methodology, its origins, critiques and possible solutions, see Langbein and Lichtman (1978) and King (1997).

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importance of the rural-urban cleavage that had dominated 19th electoral politics. As manual, mostly

urban, workers, whom socialism had always defined as its natural constituency, became a key fraction of

the electorate, voters became mobilized along class lines and electoral platforms revolved around fiscal

policy and away from constitutional issues and trade policy. However, this transformation of the electoral

space was not a sufficient condition to propel social democracy to victory. The use of plurality or majority

electoral rules, which deter the entry of third parties and which were in place until about World War One

in most countries, protected liberal and progressive incumbents from most socialist challengers (except in

those few districts with overwhelming class-conscious blue-collar majorities). To become a viable electoral

alternative, socialist candidates needed some strong organizational structure that could move all their

potential voters away from other progressive politicians. Trade unions played that coordinating role. It

was after liberal politicians refused to support union-friendly policies and trade unions responded by

endorsing socialist candidates that social democracy took off electorally: in the early 1870s in Germany, in

the 1880s in Belgium, in 1899 in Norway, in 1900 in Britain, and in the early 1900s in Sweden and

Switzerland. By contrast, it never did in the United States at the national level.

1. THE ELECTORAL BASIS OF SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

1. 1. THE RISE OF BRITISH LABOUR

To examine the rise of social democratic parties, I first analyze the evolution of their electoral

support in England and Wales, France, Germany and Sweden. Employing King=s ecological inference

method (EI from now on), I derive estimates of individual-level behavior from aggregate data collected at

electoral district level.2 (Appendix 1 describes the nature and sources of the data.)

2 King=s ecological inference method combines two ideas that are well suited for aggregate data but that have never been used in a joint manner before. Their combination leads to a notable improvement in the ecological inference process. The first element consists on the deterministic method of bounds, first introduced by Duncan and Davis (1953) and used in Shively (1974). The method of bounds employs the quantities of interest of the precincts to restrict the range of probabilities or proportions to the closed interval [0,1] or a narrower interval. Since the method of bounds is generally not sufficient to derive substantive results, King=s method adds a second component, the random coefficient model. More specifically, it assumes that the parameters are not constant and that the parameter variation can be described by a truncated bivariate normal distribution. The interested reader on the details of the

4

Party Transitions

After the electoral reform of 1884, which extended the franchise to householders in counties, the

British electorate doubled to encompass between two thirds and four fifths fourths of the adult male

population.3 Liberals and Conservatives competed for government undisturbed by a third force -- except

in Ireland, where the Nationalist party fielded candidates throughout the island -- until the formation of

the Labour party at the turn of the 20th century. As I discuss elsewhere (Boix 2004), the structure of the

vote exhibited considerable stability after the Liberal Unionists joined the Conservative party in 1886.

More than 90 per cent of those that had voted in any election voted again in the next election. Party vote

was also relatively steady over time. Over 80 per cent of the Conservative voters and, after 1886, of the

Liberal voters kept voting for the Tory party and the Liberal party respectively.

Until 1900 socialist and Labour candidates received less than 2 percent of the vote. After the

Trade Union Congress narrowly voted to establish an independent political party, a Labour

Representation Committee (LRC) was set up in 1900 to field pro-union candidates. Following the Tariff

Vale judgment by the House of Lords, a decision that jeopardized unions’ rights, the latter moved to

bolster their political arm. As a result, the number of union affiliates that joined the LRC jumped by about

0.5 million from 1901 to 1903. In 1903 the LRC and the Liberal party struck an informal pact that led the

former to sponsor 50 candidates. Twenty-nine that were returned to the Commons in 1906 took the name

of Labour Party. The pact of 1903 was maintained in the two general elections of 1910. The parliamentary

position of Labour was bolstered by the decision of the Miners’ Federation to affiliate the party in 1908

and to move its 13 MPs from the Liberal to the Labour group. By 1910 the Labor party had 1.44 million

members -- a third of them miners -- and was pursuing a strategy of moderate expansion. It sponsored 78

candidates in January 1910 -- only a marginal increase compared with the 50 sponsored in 1906 and the

13 miners. Still, the Liberal party’s explicit strategy of containing Labour from competing in a larger procedure is referred to King (1997).For a critical review, see Tam (1998). 3 The estimated proportion of enfranchised adult men varies across authors depending on the age chosen to count men and assumptions about the weight of plural vote in rural counties. For relative low estimates, see McKibbin (1990). For higher estimates, see Blewett (1972). In my estimations, based on men over 21 and plural voting as of 1902, the proportion of the enfranchised average 83 per cent, with a standard deviation of 12 per cent, a minimum value of 38 per cent and a maximum value of 100 per cent.

5

number of constituencies was clearly successful (Blewett 1972). As shown in Figure 2.A (left vertical axis

and column bars), Labour’s share of the vote grew to about 8.6 percent in 1906 but then fell to 6.2 and 7.7

in the two elections of 1910. Support for Labour appears to have been rather volatile. Figure 2.A reports

(right-hand vertical axis) the EI estimate (mean and one standard deviation) of the proportion of voters

who supported Labour in the previous election (at time t) that again voted for Labour in the following

election (at time t+1). Over 70 percent of those that voted Labour in 1900 cast their ballot for Labour in

1906. But only 56 percent of those that voted Labour in 1906 did so in the election of June of 1910.

[Figures 2.A, 2.B and 2.C here]

Before World War One, Labour’s growth was constrained by two factors. On the one hand, a

substantial part of its natural electorate, the working class, either was not enfranchised or did not vote. On

the other hand, the part of the working class that had the right to vote was clearly deterred by the plurality

system from abandoning the Liberal party, splitting the Left vote, and risking defeat at the hands of the

Conservative party. The Liberal party consciously resisted any attempts to introduce proportional

representation. A 1912 project to establish the alternative vote, which would have probably eased Lib-Lab

relationships in many constituencies and consequently strengthened the Liberal-Labour block against

Tories, was finally dismissed by Asquith’s government to avoid increasing Labour’s chances of running

more candidates.

In response to the social changes and political mobilization triggered by the war, universal male

suffrage was introduced in 1918. Immediately after the armistice, the government called an election in

November of that year. Following bitter disagreements over the role of the state in the war and the need

for universal conscription, the Liberal party had tacitly split into two groups. In December 1916, the leader

of the ‘patriotic’ wing of the Liberal party, Lloyd George, became Prime Minister with the support of the

Conservative party. After several attempts at reconciliation with Asquith failed in the fall of 1918, the

Lloyd George Liberals decided to join the Conservative party in an electoral coalition. The Conservative

leadership and Lloyd George Liberals carved out the country’s constituencies and issued a joint, patriotic

“coupon” to their favored candidates. Two main forces opposed the Coalition: a much diminished

independent Liberal party, led by Asquith; and the Labour party, which fielded 388 candidates (352 in

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England and Wales). Counting on a highly energized union movement – its membership had doubled in 5

years – and at odds with Lloyd George due to the ‘doormat’ incident of 1917, Labour now run as a

completely independent force from the Liberal party.

Due to the displacement of men that followed the process of war demobilization as well as to the

‘patriotic’ character of the electoral platform under which the Government went to the polls, turnout fell

from around 82 in December 1910 to 58 percent in 1918. The Conservative-Liberal coalition gathered 58

percent of the vote and more than 70 percent of the seats in the Commons. Labor party became the

second largest party with 25 per cent of the vote. For the first years after the war, Lloyd George and the

Conservative party elite entertained the possibility of creating a single party that could oppose the

socialist threat posed by the Labour party. Lloyd George built its electoral strategy on making strong

appeals to the anti-Socialist feelings of the British middle class. A string of impressive Labor victories in

several by-elections throughout 1919 tightened the Conservative-Liberal coalition for a while. However, a

weak showing of Lloyd George candidates in the following year’s by-elections dissuaded the Tory party

from merging forces. After the economic recession of 1919-20 eased and the rate of growth of Labor

decelerated, a majority of Conservative MPs voted in the Carlton Club of 1922 to abandon the coalition.

Two separate Liberal parties, the Labor party and the Conservative party fielded candidates in 1922. A

year later the Liberal party merged again yet, after a rebound in 1923, its electoral position started to

deteriorate rather quickly. In this context of a weakening Liberal party, Labour added new voters steadily

reaching almost 38 percent of the vote in 1929.

Figure 2.A shows that Labour relied on an extremely loyal electorate in the interwar period.

Except for the 1931 election, fought by the MacDonald cabinet under the shadow of the Great Depression

and the split of Labour, about 90 percent of voters continued to supported Labour in the following

election. Labour’s growth relied on the inflow of new voters and former Liberal supporters. Figure 2.B

reports estimates of those abstaining in election at time t but supporting Labour in the election at time

t+1. About 16 percent of the 1918 non-voters (or almost two fifths of those that went to the polls for the

first time) supported Labour in 1922. The flow of abstainers to the polls continued to benefit the Labour

party till the mid 1920s. Afterwards it was mainly the Conservative party that received most of the new

votes. Among already mobilized voters, the flow from Conservatives to Labour was always negligible – at

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around 1 percent in each election. By contrast, a substantial part (between a tenth and a fifth in the

elections of 1922, 1924 and 1929) of former Liberal voters chose to support Labor (Figure 2.C). In fact, the

flow was considerably higher in working-class districts.

British Labour and the Class Cleavage

Tables 1 and 2 complete the analysis of the transformation of the British party system by

examining the class and sectoral distribution of the electorate according to whether it was enfranchised,

had the right to vote but abstained, or voted Conservative, Liberal or Labour from 1910 to 1931.

[Table 1 here]

Since the British censuses of the period under study did not classify the population according to

class schemes (of the type that would become common in the postwar period), I proxy class composition

in the units of analysis by looking at the quality of housing (measured through the number of persons per

room). Housing and class have been shown to be highly correlated in interwar and postwar studies (Butler

and Stokes 1974). Using Lewin’s data set, the number of persons per housing and class housing show a

Pearson’s coefficient correlation of 0.73 (Lewin 1978). For the year of 1910, middle class (working class) is

defined as anyone that lives in a house with 1.5 person or less (over 1.5 person) per room. For the interwar

period, the threshold is 1 person per room.4 (Appendix 2 contains a description of data sources.) Because

the housing threshold differs across periods and hence the size of the middle and working classes are

different, Table 1 also reports the estimate with the threshold of 1.5 persons per room for the year 1918.

These results can be compared directly with the estimates for 1910.

Class played a substantial role in both the pre-war and the interwar periods. But it did so in

different ways. Before the passage of universal suffrage in 1918, the right to vote was heavily skewed in

favor of middle class citizens. Whereas only a tenth of the middle class was excluded from voting, about

two fifths of the working class didn’t have the right to vote. Within the two classes, the rate of abstention

was slightly lower among the middle class -- it reached 20 percent among the working class and about 15

4 Thresholds differ because of data availability before 1914.

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percent among the middle class in January 1910. When both figures are added, we find that about half of

the working class did not participate in parliamentary elections versus about a tenth of the middle class.

The distribution of the partisan vote varied as a function of social class. The Conservative and the Liberal

Party received 10 percent of the badly housed population -- or close to 20 percent of those that actually

voted. Labour received a quarter of their support – or half of those with the right to vote.

The introduction of universal suffrage, the critical division of the Liberal party and the formation

of the coupon Coalition altered the structure of electoral competition in Britain. Within the middle class,

the rate of abstention reached 38 per cent in 1918 and then declined to around 20 per cent in the 1920s.

After the exceptional election of 1918, the Conservative party, now separated from the Liberal party,

received 40 percent of the middle class vote in the 1920s and 53 percent in 1931. Due to the higher

abstention rate of the interwar period, this provided the Tories with a relatively predominant position

among the middle class. As a result, by the late 1920s, the Conservative party could eventually become the

anti-Labour party for former Liberal voters. Among badly housed voters, the level of abstention declined

from 49 percent in 1918 to about 25 percent in the late 1920s. Labour benefited from that increasing

turnout: its share of working class voters grew from 19 percent in 1918 to 54 percent in 1929. To put it

differently, in 1929 7 out of 10 Labour voters belonged to working class strata (as defined here).

[Table 2 here]

In short, the iconic class-based two-party model examined by the British electoral sociologist of

the postwar period (Butler and Stokes 1974) had already crystallized by the late 1920s. Table 2, which

reports the EI estimates of vote by economic sector in England and Wales in 1910 and in 1922, appears to

corroborate the same story. Sector-based voting was important before 1914. Conservatives and Liberals

concentrated their votes on different economic sectors in the pre-war period, in line with their trade

policy: on engineering and services the former; and on mining and the textile industry the latter. After

World War One those sectoral differences declined: with the shift of engineering to Liberals and Labour,

what we observe is a purely class-based rather than sectoral-based electoral cleavage. Although one

possible interpretation of that finding is that sectoral conflicts declined over time, a more convincing

9

explanation, however, is that before 1918 class-based conflicts did not find its full expression in the ballot

booth due to the abstention of one half of the working class.

1. 2. GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRACY

Party Transitions

Until the early 1860s, there were no clear organizational differences between liberal and working-

class movements in Germany. By the early 1860s in Prussia and the late 1860s in Western Germany,

however, several working-class organizations developed separately while remaining politically wedded to

the Liberals, particularly in the Western area.5 The lack of interest of the Liberals on the workers’

demands – in 1867 the parliament of the North German Confederation legislated a series of reforms at the

expense of workers – eventually pushed the VDAV, the working-class alliance in non-Prussian Germany,

to form a Socialist party a year later. In 1875, it merged with the ADAV, its Prussian counterpart, to create

the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany.

During the 1870s and in spite of competing under universal male suffrage, the German Socialist

party had some, although ultimately limited, electoral success. It polled 3 percent of the vote in 1871,

about 7 percent in 1874 and slightly over 9 percent in 1878 (see Figure 3.A., left vertical axis). The passage

of the Antisocialist Law in 1878, which allowed the police to arrest socialist leaders, close down socialist

trade unions and suspend the party press, retarded any further socialist growth for over a decade. In the

election of 1890, immediately after all repressive measures had been lifted, the SPD doubled its share of

the vote to 19.7 percent of the vote. A pattern of steady expansion put it at 34.8 percent of the valid votes

in the last elections before World War I. During the interwar period support for the socialist left

fluctuated around its pre-World War One peak– but now split between the SPD and the Communist party.

[Figures 3.A and 3.B here]

5 This account is mainly drawn from Luebbert (1991) and in part from Katznelson and Zolberg (1986).

10

As shown by Figure 3.A, which reports the estimates (mean and one standard deviation) of the

percentage of socialist voters that voted for the SPD in the next election (the one marked in the horizontal

axis), the stability of the social democratic electorate was extraordinary after the mid-1880s with over 95

percent of SPD voters casting their vote for the SPD in consecutive elections. That level of allegiance only

broke down with the split of communist party (KPD) after World War One and then under the stress of

the Great Depression. Most of the growth of the SPD took place through the mobilization of former non-

voters: about 10 percent of them in 1890 and 1903 and over 15 percent in 1912 (Figure 3.B). That was a

substantial number of voters since turnout hovered around 50 percent until the late 1880s. The SPD also

increased its voter’s share through the inclusion of former liberal voters (about a tenth of them) in the

elections held at the turn of the century.

The Party of the Protestant Working Class

The SPD was the political party of the German Protestant working class until World War Two.

Employing data at the electoral district level published by Germany’s Statistical Office, Table 3 reports the

estimated distribution of the electoral vote by religious affiliation. During the 1870s, religion was not a

fully operational political cleavage. Although the Zentrum party received the plurality of Catholic voters,

with a share of 28 percent in 1871, all Liberal parties followed rather closely with 26 percent of support.

Even the Conservative and Social Democratic vote shares were relatively balanced across religious lines

(always proportional to their overall vote). The Kulturkampf crisis reshaped the electoral game completely

(Lowell 1900). In 1881 Catholics deserted Liberal candidates and moved to support Zentrum. By the turn

of the twentieth century, the Catholic vote was consistently split between that party (about 50 percent),

other minority parties (especially the Polish group) and abstention. Moreover, the political mobilization of

the Catholic votes effectively foreclosed the entry of the SPD among non-Protestant workers. In 1907 28

percent of all Protestant voted for the SPD. Only 4 percent of Catholics did.

[Tables 3 and 4 here]

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Table 4 reports the proportion the EI estimates of the distribution of party vote in 1905 by

economic sector, status within sector (owner versus employed) and religion according to the census of

1907. The data, published by the German Statistics Office at the level of 78 regions, is taken from Sperber

(1978). The SPD was voted by about 70 percent of Protestant salaried workers in the secondary and

tertiary sectors and 16 percent of Catholic employees in those same sectors. Electoral support in the rest

of the electorate was negligible. By contrast, the Conservatives were a Protestant agrarian party and the

Left Liberals a Protestant upper- and middle-class urban party. In turn, Zentrum was a cross-class party:

among Catholics it obtained 80 percent of the vote of farmers and industry and service employers and 45

percent of the vote of industry and service employees. Since the same cross-tabulated data is not available

at the district level, I have examined the economic background of SPD voters by looking at Protestant and

Catholic districts separately. That more fine-grained data strongly confirms the results obtained using

data at the regional level.6

[Table 5 here]

Table 5 explores support for both the SPD alone and for the SPD and KPD together in the

interwar period. The German census of 1925 is less fine grained than the prewar censuses: it does not

report the data tabulated by social class and religion. Hence I have estimated the social support for those

leftist parties separately in Protestant and Catholic districts. Those estimations are reasonable because

religious affiliation was rather concentrated geographically: over 60 percent of the population was

Protestant in 408 out of 681 ‘kreis’; in turn, in 190 ‘kreis’ over 75 percent of the population was Catholic.

In Protestant areas, 41 percent of the unemployed and 31 percent of blue-collar voters cast their ballots for

the SPD in the 1924 elections. Those proportions went up to 77 percent and 50 percent for all the Left.

Support for any left-wing party remained below 5 percent among white-collar voters and the self-

employed. The SPD was effectively irrelevant in Catholic districts: less than 10 percent of its natural

constituencies (blue-collar workers and the unemployed) voted for it.

6 To do these second set of estimations, I have joined the occupational data recorded in the German census of 1907 and the electoral results of 1907. Because some of the censal data (mostly from cities) do not match the electoral districts, the number of units falls from 397 wahlkreis to 340 observations.

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1. 3. UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE AND THE RISE OF THE SAP

Party Transitions

As in Britain, the electoral strength of Swedish socialism was rather limited before the

introduction of quasi-universal male suffrage in 1911. Although the Swedish Social Democratic party

(SAP) ran its first candidates in the Riksdag election of 1890, it mainly endorsed Radical Liberal

candidates directly or established joint lists with the Liberal Party during the following decade and a half.

In 1902 the Socialist party only fielded candidates in 12 out of 230 constituencies and received 3.5 percent

of the valid votes cast. In the following two elections Liberals and Socialists operated under a tacit alliance

-- they arranged not to run candidates against each other in districts where their competition would have

led to a Conservative victory. The number of Socialist candidates doubled and the SAP obtained 9.5 and

then 14.6 percent of the valid vote in 1905 and 1908 respectively.

The electoral reform of 1909, which led both to a substantial extension of male suffrage from

about 39 percent to 79 percent of all men and to the introduction of proportional representation, put an

end to any Liberal-Socialist cooperation and brought about a spectacular increase of the Socialist vote to

29 per cent of the vote.7 By 1914 SAP’s vote share had increased to 36 percent. Although a split from the

Radical Left led to a loss of about a sixth of the vote in the following two elections, once universal suffrage

was fully introduced in the election of 1921, the SAP grew again to encompass 40 percent of the votes in

1924 and over half of the ballots in 1940 (Figure 4.A, left vertical axis).

[Figures 4.A and 4.B here]

According to the estimations reported in Figure 4.B (vertical axis), the social democratic vote was

rather volatile before 1911.8 As in the cases of Britain and Germany, the SAP manage to create, however,

7 The first figure is based on ecological inference estimations. The second one is derived from Sweden’s census data. The reform of 1909 introduced the right to vote for men 24 years or older with the exception of those that received public assistance, were bankrupt, had not resided for at least 12 months in the locality, had not complied with their tax and military obligations. The causes of exclusion were highly biased against the urban working class -- a third could not participate in the elections between 1911 and 1920. 8 Estimates are based on highly aggregated data (25 regions) and hence not very reliable: standard deviations are high (and the regression estimates on which the final estimates are computed are no statistically significant).

13

an extremely loyal basis of support – excluding those voters that moved to the Radical Left – in the

interwar period.

Class Basis of Swedish Social Democracy

The expansion of the SAP was directly related to franchise conditions. Before the elections of 1911,

only about two fifths of men had the right to vote. The franchise was highly biased against low-income

voters. About a third of farmers and between one fifth and one third of the middle class were

enfranchised. Among agricultural laborers, less than 10 percent had the right to vote.9 Even after the

electoral reform of 1909 doubled the size of the electorate, the right to vote varied substantially across

social sectors. Table 6 reports the proportion of adult men that were enfranchised and voted in the

elections of 1911 and 1920 by economic occupation. These data are taken from direct census data

(Statistiska Centralbyran 1912, 1921). Whereas over 90 per cent of the urban middle classes were

enfranchised (the proportion falling to 77 percent for artisans) and 80 to 85 percent of farmers had the

right to vote, only 65 percent of the urban working class could vote. The actual (recorded) level of

participation (over all adult males) also varied widely: from close to 60 percent among the bourgeois

sectors to 42 percent of agricultural laborers and 34 percent of urban workers.

[Table 6 and Figure 5 here]

Taking advantage from the fact that the census data reports the distribution of participation by

occupational group at the level of the electoral district (there were 56 districts from 1911 to 1920) , I

estimate the distribution of support for each party by social class directly. In 1911 the Swedish social

democratic party received 70 percent of the votes cast by urban workers and about a quarter of urban

white collars (the latter figure is imprecisely estimated). Support from agricultural laborers was close to

zero. By 1920, however, about 20 percent of those agricultural employees that voted supported the SAP.

More important, nine out of ten urban workers going to the polls endorsed the SAP.

9 Estimates are based on ecological inference analysis reported in Boix (2004).

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A similar result comes from examining direct and quite fine-grained data from the city of

Stockholm. In spite of the electoral reform of 1909, plural voting continued to be employed in local

elections in the following years. Voters were divided into 40 income grades and everyone could cast as

many ballots as the number of his income grade. Thus, whereas each elector in the first income grade

(with an average income of approximately kr. 700) received one vote, every elector in the 40th grade (with

an income above kr. 10,000) had up to 40 votes. As a result of the plural voting system, political

inequality was very stark. In Stockholm, the first ten income grades encompassed 60 percent of the

population but only controlled 28 per cent of the ballots. The richest quartile of the population held 45

percent of the ballots. Exploiting the city of Stockholm’s records of electoral behavior by income rank in

the 1913 municipal elections, Figure 5 reproduces turnout and the SAP percentage of valid votes by

income. To highlight the real distribution of party shares across the electorate, Figure 5 also indicates,

using dashed lines, the population quintiles according to income: 20 percent of the (male) population had

an annual income below kr. 300 and 80 percent below kr. 2,400.10 Participation levels differed

substantially across income levels: from less than 15 percent in the poorest quintile to 60 percent or more

among the highest quintile -- the level of participation is calculated among all men in each position and

not just among those that had the right to vote. The Social Democratic party received on average two

thirds of the vote among the bottom 60 percent of the population and about 40 percent of the vote in the

next quintile. Among voters with an income over kr. 3,000, their support fell to less than 5 percent.11

To summarize, the election of 1911 inaugurated the Swedish modern party system. Under

proportional representation, the Lib-Lab alliances of 1893-1908 became obsolete and the Social

Democratic party was free to run as an independent party in the general election of 1911. More important,

the influx of new voters, who overwhelmingly came from low-income strata, benefited the SAP above all

other parties. In very few years the Social Democratic party became the hegemonic party of the urban

working classes. This set the Social Democratic party ready for another big electoral expansion once the

10 The annual income of a blue-collar worker averaged kr. 1,800 in 1913. The average annual rent of a three-room apartment was kr. 753 in 1912. 11 Liberal and Conservative parties split the remaining third of the valid vote among the bottom 70 percent of the population). Their vote share rose to about 30-35 percent among voters with a yearly income between kr. 1,500 and 2,500 (about 15 percent of the population). They only diverged among the top 15 percent of the population - with 70 to 90 percent voting for the Conservatives and less than 15 percent for the Liberals.

15

remaining barriers to universal suffrage were abolished in 1920 -- in 1921 its national share of the vote

went up from 30 to 36 percent.

1. 4. THE FORTUNES OF FRENCH SOCIALISM

Although organized socialism was born relatively early in France, its partisan and electoral history

was marked by considerable fractiousness and only mild levels of success. Growing out of the unionist

movement, but opposed to its syndicalist tendencies, the followers of Jules Guesde, a disciple of Marx,

organized the Parti Ouvrier de France (POF) in the 1880s. However, its claim to represent the working

class at the ballot box was hotly contested by at least two other main organizations, Paul Brousse’s

Possibilists and Allemane’s Parti Ouvrier des Travailleurs Socialistes. Socialism remained divided in

France until the formation of the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO) in 1905 under the

leadership of Jean Jaurès. Yet even after the creation of SFIO, a fraction of the socialist movement was

still represented by small parties and independent candidates. After World War One it went through a

severe organizational split that resulted in the emergence of a strong communist competitor.

[Figure 6 here]

As shown in Figure 6 (left axis, column bars), French socialism enjoyed a sharp electoral

breakthrough in 1893, when its share of the vote grew from 1.8 percent to 10.5 percent of the ballots. It

again doubled the number of ballots in 1910. With a vote share at 17.5 percent in 1914, support for

socialism in France was twice the size of Britain’s before World War One. But, in contrast to the Labour

party, the war did not boost the electoral fortunes of the SFIO. In the elections of 1919 and 1928, the

socialist lists collected about a fifth of the vote. As a result, support for French socialism remained low

relative to its German and Swedish counterparts. (The analysis of electoral outcomes at the party level

cannot be done in 1924 and the 1930s because the SFIO run in a joint coalition with other left parties

under the Cartel des Gauches in those elections.)

Besides being relatively weak, French socialism had a volatile electorate. Figure 6 reports the

estimated proportion of socialist voters that again voted for a socialist candidate in the following election

16

(right vertical axis). EI estimations are based on district level data for pre-World War elections (with some

districts matched across elections in those few cases that underwent boundary changes). Estimations for

the interwar period are based on department-level data since the electoral law of 1919 employed them to

allocate seats. Figure 6 does not provide any estimations for 1924 (with respect to 1919) because most

socialist candidates ran under the banner of the Cartel des Gauches (jointly with radical and radical

socialist parties). Estimates for 1928 are based on the electoral behavior of 1919 and as such they should

be taken as simply suggestive of general behavioral trends.

In 1910 nine out of ten voters that had supported a socialist candidate in 1906 voted again

socialist. But that election was exceptional. Thirty percent ceased to vote socialist in the 1914 election.

After World War One, socialist candidates only received the continuous support of about two thirds of

their voters. French socialist parties had a hard time insulating their voters within a tight political

subculture. In the election of 1914, for example, one tenth of former socialist voters cast their ballot for

radical socialist candidates, one tenth voted for independent politicians and another tenth abstained.

2. SOCIAL DEMOCRACY AS A VIABLE ELECTORAL ALTERNATIVE

Universal Suffrage and the Search for a Liberal Supra-class Strategy

The first part of the chapter showed that social democratic parties only grew after the franchise

had been sufficiently broadened to encompass their natural constituency: the working class. Labour’s

poor showings in the United Kingdom in the pre-war period were directly related to a restrictive electoral

law that excluded between a third and two fifths of the low-income population from the ballot box. Once

that restriction was lifted in 1918, Labour became hegemonic among urban workers. Swedish social

democracy, which relied on urban workers, expanded in conjunction with the extension of suffrage in 1911

and then again in 1921. In Germany, the SPD took off only after the German state abandoned its

repressive strategies of the 1880s. However, universal suffrage was not a sufficient condition to develop

large social democratic parties. France introduced male universal suffrage in 1848 and then again after

1870 and yet the socialist party never became the dominant party of the left. Table 7 extends those results

17

to all advanced democracies. It classifies (along its horizontal axis) countries depending on whether they

had quasi-universal or universal male suffrage and then marks in italics those that had a significant social

democratic party. No country with restrictive franchise conditions had one. Still, Southern Germany,

Flemish Belgium, the USA and Switzerland did not.

[Table 6 here]

Having a large (and enfranchised) working class was not enough to sustain a vibrant social

democratic movement. The United had a large urban working class but failed to develop a strong socialist

party. Similarly, all the attempts to organize a socialist party in London were futile before 1900

(Thompson 1967). French socialism took long to emerge as a viable electoral machine and only secured

the support of a fraction of the French working class (Zolberg 1986). The electoral success of the PSOE

was geographically spotty during the Second Republic: the Catalan working class embraced anarchism

and syndicalism and the fraction that turned out voted for Esquerra Republicana, the equivalent of

French Radicalism. As a matter of fact, social democracy was sometimes strong in regions with a weak

urban working class. In Australia, the main supporters of the Labor party came from pastoral and

agrarian workers (most of them working in large latifundia). Canada’s CCF had a strong backing among

farmers in the Western states. In Finland, nine-tenths of the socialist votes cast in the first elections (in

1907) came from the countryside, especially from agricultural workers and crofters (small leaseholders

who paid their rent to a landowner) (Bartolini 1990).

The fortunes of electoral socialism were eventually determined by the capacity of liberal and

progressive candidates to organize, borrowing Przeworski and Sprague’s expression, a “supra-class”

strategy encompassing both both the middle classes (commercial employees, shopkeepers, the petty

bourgeoisie and so on) and urban workers (at least, their skilled and semi-skilled strata). For a while, that

is, even after the introduction of universal suffrage, liberal parties were generally sheltered from their

social democratic competitors by the nature of the existing electoral system. Liberal parties had more

resources and benefited from having a clear brand or name recognition. Above all, non-proportional

representation rules, in place until the first decades of the twentieth century, gave them a strong “electoral

advantage” vis-à-vis socialist candidates. Left-leaning voters eschewed the latter and coordinated around

18

liberal candidates to defeat conservative politicians. Accordingly, liberal parties constantly appealed to

their own electoral viability, as already proven in previous elections, to make sure that working-class

voters and trade unions would not shift to politically closer but of as yet untested Labor candidates.

Moreover, aware of the strategic advantage inherent to the electoral system in place, non-socialist

politicians systematically “manipulated” the institutional rules of the game. As shown in Boix (2010),

liberal candidates running in urban districts had strong incentives to maintain electoral systems that

secured that electoral advantage. When social democratic parties became too threatening, they tinkered

with the electoral law to make socialist candidates contented without endangering the broader

‘progressive’ coalition. Before World War One, the British Liberal party attempted to amend the plurality

system with an alternative vote system (Morris 1921): that would have maintained the Liberal lead in the

Left camp, allowed Labour to pick up some seats, and minimized their joint losses against Conservative

candidates in three-cornered fights (Blewett 1972). New Zealand’s Liberal premier introduced a two-

round majoritarian system in 1908 to minimize the effects of a split Left vote (Milne 1966).

Nonetheless, manipulating the electoral law ran into limits in the medium term. As the franchise

expanded, liberal and progressive parties could only survive as a broad party of the middle and working

classes. Yet such a political strategy was hard to implement. The economic and redistributive interests of

those two social groups were generally too disparate to keep them together under a single political

umbrella. Too little redistribution implied alienating the working class. Too much redistribution

threatened to anger middle class voters. The trade-off between catering to middle class interests and

responding to workers’ demands was probably more severe in those (generally large) economies where

the distribution of risks and the effects of the business cycle were skewed along income lines (Baldwin

1990, Mares 2003). It was also exacerbated by the fact that high earners owned very mobile types of

assets that were hard to tax – that forced states to rely on taxation tools that fell on middle class voters.

The success of a liberal supra-class strategy seems to have been related to the historical sequence

of franchise extensions (to working class voters) and the formation of socialist parties. In those countries

in which the expansion of the franchise to working-class voters was contemporaneous to or followed the

formation of credible socialist parties, the non-socialist left did not have the electoral credibility and the

policy and organizational tools to incorporate manual workers to their electoral coalitions. By contrast,

19

liberalism was much more effective in containing socialism in those countries where universal male

suffrage had been in operation a few decades before socialist parties contested elections: Switzerland

(until 1914), France (until the late interwar period), Canada and the United States. The existing

progressive parties (radicals, liberals or democrats) had the capacity and time to adjust its policy platform

to shifts in the electorate or in the preferences of electorates and therefore to preempt the entry of

candidates on their left flank. The introduction of universal suffrage before the emergence of socialist

parties did not mechanically ensure, however, the survival of political liberalism. In Australia Labour

became strong rather quickly even though universal male suffrage had been in place since the late 1850s

and early 1860s in the initial colonies. The success of Australian Labour can be traced directly back to the

formation of independent trade unions and to massive strikes in response to the great recession of the

early 1890s. In New Zealand Liberals dominated the political arena based on a coalition of small farmers

and urban workers until World War One. However, the Reform Party’s long tenure in power from 1912 to

1928 and the consolidation of all the socialist parties into a “United Labour Party” in 1912 led the Liberal

party to experience a gradual process of decline and to eventually merge with the Reform party into the

National party (Milne 1966: 28-48).12

Liberal Failure (and Christian Democratic Success)

The failure of liberal parties to capture the working class can be dated quite precisely. Once liberal

politicians did not accommodate the labor and regulatory demands of the organized sections of the

industrial working class, trade unions, the latter run to create or endorse socialist parties. That shift in

trade union allegiances allowed social democratic candidates to overcome the coordination constraints

imposed by the existing electoral system and eroded the hegemony of liberalism in the left half of the

electoral arena very quickly. Table 7 distinguishes (along its vertical axis) between those country-periods

12 Notice that the preceding discussion allows us to reject two popular hypotheses about the relationship between constitutional regimes and socialist parties. On the one hand, the emergence of a more radicalized, i.e. more socialist, working class was not limited, as some have claimed, to places where the state had imposed very restrictive participation conditions (cf. Zolberg 1986): Australia and New Zealand were liberal polities where socialism made big electoral inroads very early in time. On the other hand, the reverse causal story is not plausible either: the relatively strength of socialist parties did not determine the extent and timing of suffrage concessions. Australia, Canada, France, New Zealand, Switzerland and the USA had the latter before having the former.

20

in which unions supported social democratic parties and those country-periods in which they did not.

Provided universal suffrage was in place, social democracy succeeded after unions had abandoned the old

liberal or progressive politicians -- with the exception of France. But even in France union behavior

mattered electorally: although the CGT did not endorse the SFIO, many of its members were

systematically voting for the latter (Zolberg 1986: 424-425).

Trade unions grew in size, bolstered by the second industrial revolution and the emergence of

large-scale firms and standardized work procedures, to the point where they could become significant

political actors, only after the 1880s (Marks 1989). During the first part of the 19th century, the first wave

of industrialization, based on textile industries and relatively small factories, kept the number of unions

and unionized workers at relatively low levels. Moreover, most unions were controlled by the ‘aristocracy’

of the working class, that is, by skilled, craft-oriented workers interested in protecting their wages by

excluding the unskilled workforce from their trades. The expansion of new types of industries as a result

of the technological revolution of the second half of the 19th century led to bigger firms and to the

emergence of a work force that made collective action problems easier to solve. Solidarity among workers

could be sustained within a firm more successfully than across multiple, small companies. With the

introduction of mass production techniques, workers’ skills were more difficult to define and thus the

separation between unskilled and skilled workers eroded. Accordingly, broader, more general unions were

easier to organize.13 Still, mainstream trade unions often avoided being mixed up in electoral contests, at

least until the 1890s. When they did, they generally supported the candidates of the left-leaning (liberal,

radical or progressive) party.

Nonetheless, once the existing state institutions blocked unions’ key economic and labor demands

and after liberal parties did little to address their complaints, trade unions decided to launch or endorse

13 The process of unionization was, however, slow and the number of unionized workers remained low. Before the turn of the 20th century, the highest levels of trade unionization (in Britain and Denmark) stood at around 16-18 percent of the dependent labor force. But a substantial number of countries had unionization rates around 2 to 5 percent of the labor force. Unionization rates grew rapidly in the 1910s and particularly in the period of 1917-22 -- at a time of great social agitation, unionization rates reached almost half of the work force in Belgium and Sweden and averaged about a fourth of the labor force in Western Europe.

21

an independent labor or socialist movement in direct competition with the existing parties (and

particularly with their former allies). Britain is a case in point. In the late decades of the 19th century both

Liberals and Conservatives competed for the votes for the enfranchised strata of the working class.

Broadly speaking, the trade union movement, which was basically structured around craft-based unions

in the hands of the skilled sectors of the working class, supported the Liberal party. But, as shown in table

2, union positions had an important sectoral dimension. Conservatives received the vote of those sectors

interested in protectionist policies. Several anti-free trade episodes, such as an early resolution of the

National of Conservative Associations in 1887 in favor of ‘fair trade’, the ‘Made in Germany’ panic of 1896

and the reimposition of sugar dues, the coal export duty and the corn duty in the late 1890s and early

1900s and Chamberlain’s proposals for tariff reform should be interpreted as attempt at snatching part of

the working class electorate from free-trading Liberals. The explosion in the early 1890s of new unions

organizing the less skilled workers in industries such as transport, gaswork and the docks eroded part of

the traditional dominance of the old type of craft-based unions. But that was insufficient to sustain the

formation of an independent Labor party. Although in 1893 the Trade Union Congress (TUC) approved a

separate fund for assisting independent labor candidates, the initiative had little success. Trade unions

did not implement that resolution and Liberal politicians with union connections actively blocked it.

Seven years later the TUC endorsed the creation of the Labor Representation Committee (LRC) with the

goal of raising the number of labor parliamentarians and of creating a separate parliamentary caucus.

Without a coherent leadership and any sizable financial resources, the LRC sponsored 15 candidates in

the 1900 elections. Only two were elected. The political alignment of unions and the electoral fortune of

British socialism changed sharply after the House of Lords passed the Taff Vale judgment, which held a

union liable for economic damages caused to an employer by a strike action, in 1901. The British union

movement reacted by strongly supporting independent political action. Twenty nine LRC-sponsored

candidates were elected in 1906. They formally established the Labour party immediately after the general

election of 1906. Before World War I, Labour held between thirty and forty seats in Parliament before

World War I – in many cases they were won in constituencies in which Liberals had accepted not to run

their own candidate (Searle 1992). If was after 1918 and in the context of strong divisions within the

Liberal party that Labour became a completely independent, and highly successful, party.

22

Allowing for some idiosyncratic variation across cases, the same correlation between unions’

behavior and social democratic success held up everywhere else. The Australian Labor party was born as a

reaction to a harsh series of employer-union confrontations in 1890-93. As in Britain, in Norway the

initially liberal workers’ association gradually moved to support Socialist candidates between 1899 and

1906 after the Liberal party refused to give more weight to working-class candidates and blocked any hint

of cooperation with socialist trade unions (Luebbert 1991: 121-125): as a result, the Socialist vote rose

from less than 1 percent to over 16 percent in those years. In Denmark, the social democratic party

functioned as a coordinating body for socialist trade unions in the early 1880s. The Copenhagen

Federation of Trade Unions, the predecessors of the LO, were committed to support the social democratic

party since its formation in 1886. Similarly, in Belgium and Sweden the founders of the trade union

movement and the socialist party were the same individuals. In Sweden the initial Lib-Lab strategic

electoral alliances collapsed once the extension of male suffrage and proportional representation gave

social democrats enough room to compete for seats directly. In the Netherlands and Switzerland the social

democratic party surpassed the 10 percent threshold after trade unions started to cooperate with it

(Bartolini 1990). In Spain the PSOE only made any inroads in those places where the urban working class

had been organized by the Socialist trade union UGT (Maravall 1978).

The inability of liberal parties to establish cross-class coalitions and retain the support of trade

unions contrasts with the success of Christian democratic across Europe. As shown in table 4, the

Zentrum party was able to incorporate a substantial part of the Catholic working class, making it

impossible for the SPD to move beyond the Protestant working class. In Belgium the Catholic party relied

too on a relatively broad cross-class coalition. It received the vote of four fifths of all Belgian farmers and

about one fifth of the urban working class. Support for the Catholic party was much higher, at about 35

percent, among Flemish industrial workers. The success of the Catholic party was also sustained by the

implementation of progressive policies. The Catholic cabinet introduced comprehensive legislation on

health insurance in 1894, pensions in 1900, industrial accidents in 1903 and unemployment benefits in

1907 in response to its urban electorate (Boix 2004). It also had a strong organizational component:

before World War One Catholic unions organized as many workers as the Socialist unions did -- they

roughly mobilized 100,000 workers each.

23

Containing Socialism

The successful containment of socialism took two forms. In continental Europe it was based on

organizing political competition around an electoral dimension that dominated the class-based cleavage.

In France (and partly in Switzerland), liberals resorted to cultivating anticlericalism as an electoral issue

common to both middle class voters and urban workers. The unfolding of aggressive secularization

strategies at the time modern mass politics was born was not coincidental. In France the radical party

managed to hold together its electoral coalition quite successfully by launching a long series of systematic

attacks on the Catholic Church until the turn of the century (Goguel-Nyegaard 1958). French radicalism

complemented this with a moderate expansion of welfare programs. Still, the anticlerical coalition

unraveled over time: in 1917 the Swiss socialist party received 3 out of 10 ballots; in France it was

overtaken by the socialist and communist parties in the 1930s and particularly after World War Two.

(France after World War Two).

In North America, the response of the liberal/progressive movement was one of policy adaptation

to the challenges of the socialist left. In Canada, the social democratic Co-operative Commonwealth

Federation, which had formed in response to the Great Depression, mounted a credible challenge to the

dominant Liberal party. By August 1943, the CCF had become the official opposition in Ontario. In

September the Gallup Poll showed the CCF to be one point ahead of the Liberals in Canada (29 to 28

percent), five points ahead in Ontario and eighteen points ahead in the West. But Liberals, who had

already been shifting away from their traditional pro-business laissez-faire positions since the end of

World War One and that cultivated their relationships with industrial unions through the creation of a

federal ministry of Labor, responded in earnest. After the release of the September Gallup Poll, the

Advisory Council of the National Liberal Federation adopted a new program of reform that, in the words

of its leader, Mackenzie King, would “improve the lot of (. . .) farmers and working people [and] cut the

ground in large part from under the CCF” (quoted in Horowitz 1966, p. 169). In the elections of 1945 the

CCF would obtain about 16 percent of the votes, which translated into 29 seats (a tenth of the parliament)

due to the electoral system.

24

In the United States, Democratic politicians seemed to have combined two political strategies to

sustain their dominant position in the left. On the one hand, they also promoted, like Canada’s liberal

party, progressive policies such as the Social Security Act of 1935 and massive countercyclical programs

under the New Deal. On the other hand, they bought off urban working populations through clientelistic

policies. During its peak years of electoral support, in the 1910s, the American Socialist party gained

between 3 and 6 percent of the national vote in presidential elections and was barely represented in

Congress. That level of support was not much different from the British Labour party before World War I,

but it did not lead to any further growth in the interwar period. This dimension of American

exceptionalism has been accounted for employing three broad types of variables: political institutions;

cultural or behavioral; and the organizational and strategic choices of unions and parties.

According to institutionalist explanations, the weakness of socialism in the United States is

related to the mechanisms through which the electorate chooses its representatives. It is hard to believe,

however, that either plurality vote or federalism hurt the American Socialist party (by boosting strategic

voting among voters in favor of the more viable Democratic party). Plurality rule with single-member

districts was also used in Australia and United Kingdom. Australia, Germany and Switzerland had federal

structures. In all those countries social democracy was eventually very successful. Presidentialism might

have mattered. Having national presidential elections turns the whole country into a single-member

constituency and makes it particularly hard for third parties to emerge as viable candidates against well-

established parties. Still, the United States knew several episodes of third-party candidacies that gathered

strong support. In 1924, for example, the Progressive candidate La Follette picked, with the support of

farmer associations and trade unions, 16.6 percent of valid votes.

In turn, the failure of socialism in the United States has been often attributed to cultural

(ideational) motivations, particularly, the fact that American citizens in general and American workers in

particular have always been conservative and opposed to statist solutions. That has been then related to

those economic and social traits that made the American working class different from the European one.

In the United States the tertiary sector was much bigger than in Europe, probably leading to the formation

of a large white-collar class with a weak degree of class consciousness. The supply of labor was based on

immigrants from overseas who were highly fragmented along ethnic and religious lines and hence difficult

25

to organize on the basis of class identity. American workers were extremely mobile and often stayed in the

United States temporarily: in 1908-1910, there were 32 recorded departures from the US for every 100

recorded arrivals (there were 56 departures per 100 arrivals among Southern Italians, for example). For

that reason they invested little time and resources in the creation of permanent organizations. Finally, the

availability of cheap land might have acted too as a mechanism that would have made workers and lower

classes more conservative. The weight of these behavioral explanations (which in part hinge on

organizational conditions) is difficult to gauge. American public opinion appears to be more conservative

in economic issues than its European counterpart at least since surveys have been conducted. But some

data tend to point in the other direction. The union movement in the United States was extremely

combative at the turn of the century. The Socialist party was relatively successful in certain areas of the

country such as Wisconsin. American trade unions, which had a strong anti-statist or syndicalist

component in the first decades of the 20th century, turned very strongly in favor of welfare state policies

after the Depression of 1929. The Democratic coalition of the 1930s engaged in policies comparable to

those pursued by social democratic governments in Europe at that time – only to be blocked by Southern

Democrats (Skocpol, Pierson). According to a Roper survey conducted in 1939, three fourths of Americans

agreed with the statement that the government should see that everyone was above subsistence. One fifth

of wage workers (and one third of the unemployed) was open to abolish capitalism if needed to give relief

to everyone (Verba and Schlozman 1977). In the 1940s about a fourth of those polled expressed support

for the formation of a Socialist party.

Turning to organizational factors now, the nature of American unionism has been brought in also

to explain the failure of a social democratic alternative in the United States (Lipset and Marks 2000).

Whereas Australian and British unions were broad-based and represented both skilled and unskilled

unions after the organizational drives of the 1890s, most American unions remained controlled by skilled

workers. The interests and strategies of these two types of unions differed considerably. General unions

did not (or could not) control or regulate the supply of labor – due to the characteristics of their affiliates

– and therefore followed a much more encompassing or inclusive strategy: they tried to recruit most

workers; they exercised strong pressure on all employers to obtain better wage and labor conditions; and

were open to engage in political action to obtain, through legislation, any improvements in their working

26

conditions. By contrast, craft-based unions, controlled by skilled workers, focused mostly on defending

apprenticeship regulations and other barriers to entry in their labor market that could reduce the supply

of unskilled workers and therefore maintain their high wages. That might have indeed explained by the

American trade union movement systematically reject the Socialist party, at least at the national level.

Still, trade unions were not always opposed to social democracy. In fact, they were instrumental in the

success of the Socialist party at the local level in a few cities of the industrial belt. In Milwaukee,

Wisconsin, where the Federated Trade Unions Council was closely intertwined with the Socialist party,

the latter won 45 percent of the seats of the town council in the 1920s and retained the mayorship until

1940. Similar experiences took place in Reading, New York City and Minneapolis.

The lack of trade unions’ support for a socialist party is, however, a covariate of the failure of

socialism. European trade unions abandoned the liberal party in response to the latter’s incapacity to

satisfy their demands. Likewise, union support for a socialist alternative was patchy in the United States

because the Democratic party could deliver the goods. Because democracy and universal male suffrage

had preceded industrialization, the existing political parties had the organizational resources to integrate

the urban working class when it formed. The Democratic party (and in some cases the Republican party

too) did through the construction of urban party machines that sustained extensive clientelistic networks.

Those networks cut the ground from under any socialist alternative. As a very late entrant in the electoral

game, the American Socialist party could not credibly convince enough precinct captains (and their

followers) to endorse simultaneously some broad social democratic redistributive program.

3. CONCLUSIONS

Social democracy was electorally successful when two conditions applied: the franchise had been

extended to a significant fraction of the working class; and socialist candidates could count on the

organizational support of labor unions. In turn, labor unions only endorsed socialist parties (over any

other left-wing or progressive party) when non-socialist progressive candidates preferred to cater to the

interests of the middle classes over the demands of urban workers and/or they could not find a way to

construct a supra-class electoral strategy including all non-conservative voters. In the paper I have offered

27

some preliminary thoughts on some of the reasons why liberal parties had very different levels of success

in the pursuit of such an inclusive or encompassing electoral strategy. Naturally, much further work needs

to be done. But what seems certain is that any satisfactory theory about the rise of social democracy (and

about the final structure of party systems across the world) must examine the fortunes of socialism in the

context of the strategic choices that non-socialist parties made in the path toward full democratic

institutions one hundred years ago.

28

APPENDIX 1. ELECTORAL DATA SOURCES.

Electoral Data. England and Wales. The ecological inference estimates are derive from data collected at

the the constituency level in England and Wales from 1885 to 1935. Data for the period 1885-1910 comes

from the Constitutional Year Book (several years) and encompasses about 470 constituencies. The

number of units available to analysis varies, however, between 331 (in the analysis of 1895-1900) and 436

(in the analysis of the change from the election of January 1910 to the election of December that same

year) due to changes in the number of constituencies that were actually contested by more than one

candidate. Data for the period 1918-1935 is taken from the data set gathered by Miller (1978).

Electoral Data. Sweden. The aggregate data for the period 1887 to 1911 is organized at the level of 25

counties (>län=), provided in the machine-readable file SSD_0140 provided in Swedish Social Science Data

Services. These data are supplemented with more detailed data for the city of Stockholm (that is a county)

taken from the Stockholm Statistical Yearbook. Electoral data for both national elections for period 1911-

1940, organized at either the level of 56 electoral districts (in place between 1911 and 1920) or the level of

443 jurisdictional districts, are taken from Rigsdaksmannvalen (several years) the machine-readable file

SSD_0204 from the Swedish Social Science Data Services.

Electoral Data. Germany. The aggregate data for the period 1871 to 1912 is organized at the level of (397)

wahlkreis, taken from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, GERMAN

REICHSTAG ELECTION DATA, 1871-1912 [Computer file] (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium

for Political and Social Research [producer and distributor], 197?. The aggregate data for the period

1920-1924 come from Caramani (2004). The aggregate data for the period 1924-1933 is taken from King

et al. (2001).

Electoral Data. France. The electoral data from France comes from Duguet (1889) for the election of 1889,

the Annuaire Statistique (1894) for the election of 1893, Behaime-Tonnier (1906) for 1906, Lachapelle-Le

Chesnais (1914) for 1910 and 1914, Lachapelle (1919) for 1919, Lachapelle (1924) and Caramani (2004) for

1928.

29

APPENDIX 2. SOURCES OF SOCIAL AND RELIGIOUS DATA.

England and Wales. Social and economic data come from the census of 1910, 1920 and 1930. Scotland

and Northern Ireland had been excluded because census population on housing does not exist.The data

for 1910 has been directly obtained from its publication in the collection of Parliamentary Papers. Data

from the census of 1920 and 1930 come from Miller (1978). Two types of information have been

employed: (a) Data on class composition; (b) Economic sectors, such as agriculture, textile, mining,

engineering, civil service, etc. Since the census data is organized in districts that do not match the

parliamentary constituencies, to apply the ecological inference method, the electoral data at the

constituency level has been aggregated into larger units (‘constant units’) that match the economic

information (economic sectors and housing quality). For the period preceding WWI this generates 105

units. For the interwar period, there are 134 ‘constant units’ -- the interwar ‘constant units’ are taken from

Miller (1978).14

Sweden. Social data on economic sectors come from three sources: For the period 1911-1924, the statistics

on parliamentary elections at the level of each electoral district (56 until 1920, 28 afterwards) are

accompanied by additional data on proportion of professions in each electoral district (detailing total

number, number with the right to vote, and number that actually voted) and come from the Swedish

Statistical Office (1911, 1921).

Germany. The religious data is aggregate at the electoral district level and is taken from the

Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, GERMAN REICHSTAG ELECTION DATA,

1871-1912 [Computer file] (Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research

[producer and distributor], 197?. The occupational data is taken from the Census of 1907.

14 Following Miller’s criteria, electorate totals and vote totals for each party group were calculated over all the constituencies in the unit. Where a constituency returned a member unopposed the votes total for the member’s party was increased by a proportion of the constituency’s electorate equal to the average turnout for all contested seats at that election. The proportions of electorate, and of total votes, for each party were then calculated from these totals. For the period before 1914, the proportion of men that are enfranchised is calculated excluding those votes due to the condition of ownership -- this second vote, which was only given in rural counties, benefitted about 0.5 million voters out of around 7.6 million voters (data is for 1910).

30

TABLE 1. Class Structure and Electoral Behavior in England and Wales, 1910-1935

Well Housed

Person per room Below 1.5 ------------- Below 1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1910 1918 1918 1922 1923 1924 1929 1931 1935

Cons

39 27* 29* 40 38 42 39 53 43

Lib

36 11 10 6 1 1 1 6 3

Lib

9** 10** 17** 31 24 30 9 8

Sum Lib

36 19 21 24 32 25 30 15 11

Lab

1 12 11 16 9 15 13 11 19

Non-Vot.

15 40 38 20 21 18 17 21 27

Unenfr.

9

Badly Housed

Person per room Over 1.5 ------------- Over 1 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

1910 1918 1918 1922 1923 1924 1929 1931 1935

Cons

8 7* 12* 14 9 23 11 20 14

Lib

2 15 16 11 1 2 1 3 5

Lib

0 3** 3** 8** 11 3 5 4 2

Sum Lib

2 18 19 19 12 4 5 7 7

Lab

25 21 19 31 43 47 54 45 49

Non-Vot.

20 50 49 35 35 25 28 26 29

Unenfr.

42 0

*Coalition (Conservative & LLG Liberals) **Asquith Liberals

a Where at least two parties compete

31

Table 2. Party Vote and Economic Sectors in England and Wales

Economic Sector and Party Vote in England and Wales, January 1910

Army, Civil

Agriculture Mining Engineering Textile Service, Professionals

Not Enfranchised 1 1 6 9 36

Enfranchised Not Voting 15 6 12 20 1

Conservatives 84 39 9 42 17

Liberals & Labour 1 59 75 33 47

Economic Sector and Party Vote in England and Wales, 1922

Army, Civil

Agriculture Mining Engineering Textile Service, Professionals

Enfranchised Not Voting * 27 * *

Conservatives 83 48 1 45 1

Liberals 14 36 25 15 *

Labour 3 40 60 70

32

Table 3. Religion and Vote in Germany, 1871-1907

Conserv. Liberals

Zentrum SPD

Other Abstention

1871 Protestant 0.14

0.26

0.00

0.02

0.02

0.55

0.01

0.00

0.00

0.00

0.01

0.01

Catholic

0.08

0.20

0.28

0.01

0.06

0.37

0.01

0.02

0.02

0.00

0.02

0.01

Other

0.01

0.08

0.01

0.01

0.88

0.02

0.00

0.15

0.00

0.01

0.17

0.01

1881 Protestant 0.22

0.30

0.00

0.04

0.02

0.42

0.01

0.01

0.00

0.01

0.01

0.01

Catholic

0.02

0.05

0.37

0.01

0.11

0.45

0.01

0.01

0.02

0.00

0.02

0.01

Other

0.01

0.38

0.00

0.01

0.58

0.02

0.01

0.40

0.00

0.02

0.41

0.01

1893 Protestant 0.27

0.28

0.00

0.19

0.02

0.24

0.01

0.01

0.00

0.01

0.01

0.01

Catholic

0.02

0.06

0.44

0.03

0.13

0.33

0.01

0.01

0.02

0.01

0.02

0.01

Other

0.04

0.06

0.01

0.67

0.18

0.04

0.09

0.04

0.00

0.24

0.18

0.02

1907 Protestant 0.29

0.29

0.00

0.28

0.03

0.11

0.02

0.02

0.00

0.02

0.01

0.01

Catholic

0.02

0.07

0.52

0.04

0.16

0.19

0.01

0.01

0.02

0.01

0.02

0.01

Other

0.00

0.06

0.00

0.91

0.01

0.02

0.00

0.08

0.00

0.08

0.00

0.00

Table 4. Party Vote in 1907 by Economic Sector, Class and Religion Agriculture -------------------------------- Industry+Commerce -------------------- Owners ----------- Employees -------- Owners ---------- Employees -------- Prot Cath Prot Cath Prot Cath Prot Cath

Conserv mean 0.29 0.01 0.89 0.04 0.04 0.01 0.04 0.01 sd 0.10 0.01 0.12 0.03 0.02 0.00 0.05 0.00

Nat Lib mean 0.44 0.11 0.03 0.09 0.11 0.06 0.16 0.14 sd 0.12 0.07 0.03 0.12 0.11 0.07 0.08 0.07

Left Lib mean 0.07 0.01 0.03 0.02 0.55 0.01 0.03 0.02 sd 0.08 0.01 0.05 0.01 0.15 0.00 0.07 0.01

Zentrum mean 0.01 0.80 0.01 0.02 0.01 0.80 0.01 0.45 sd 0.00 0.10 0.00 0.02 0.00 0.15 0.00 0.09

SPD mean 0.01 0.01 0.01 0.02 0.12 0.05 0.70 0.16 sd 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.03 0.05 0.08 0.03 0.08

Other mean 0.06 0.01 0.01 0.72 0.02 0.01 0.01 0.04 sd 0.04 0.00 0.01 0.27 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.03

Absten. mean 0.11 0.04 0.02 0.09 0.16 0.04 0.05 0.18 sd 0.04 0..03 0.02 0.12 0.04 0.02 0.02 0.06

TABLE 5. PARTY VOTE BY CLASS IN THE 1924 GERMAN ELECTIONS.

In Districts with over 60% Protestants In Districts with over 75% Catholics

Unem- Blue White Self- Other Unem- Blue White Self- Other ployed collar collar employed ployed collar collar employed SPD mean 0.41 0.31 0.01 0.05 0.04 0.09 0.09 0.09 0.05 0.01

sd 0.05 0.04 0.00 0.02 0.02 0.02 0.02 0.03 0.01 0.00

Non-SPD mean 0.42 0.63 0.91 0.25 0.85 0.71 0.64 0.71 0.04 0.96

sd 0.05 0.04 0.03 0.11 0.06 0.10 0.10 0.09 0.03 0.04

Left mean 0.77 0.50 0.02 0.01 0.01 0.42 0.17 0.15 0.07 0.01

(SPD+KPD) s.d. 0.03 0.02 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.08 0.05 0.11 0.02 0.01

Non-Left mean 0.11 0.40 0.89 0.31 0.92 0.37 0.57 0.67 0.03 0.93

s.d. 0.04 0.03 0.03 0.08 0.04 0.16 0.09 0.19 0.02 0.05

TABLE 6. Classes and Parties in Sweden, 1911 & 1920

Proportion of Economic Classes Enfranchised, Voting, and Choosing SAP

Election of 1911

Upper Farmers Urban Middle

Agric. Laborers

Urban Workers

Right to Vote / Total a mean 0.84 0.96 0.81 0.85 0.64

std 0.04 0.18 0.06 0.18 0.11

Voted / Total a mean 0.57 0.57 0.50 0.42 0.34

std 0.05 0.14 0.05 0.12 0.08

Soc over Voters b mean 0.28 0.02 0.36 0.03 0.70

std 0.19 0.01 0.12 0.01 0.11

a Based on Census b Based on EI estimates

Election of 1920

Upper Farmers Urban Middle

Agric. Laborers

Urban Workers

Right to Vote / Total a mean 0.84 0.96 0.87 0.88 0.64

std 0.03 0.04 0.04 0.09 0.09

Voted / Total a mean 0.58 0.57 0.55 0.39 0.34

std 0.04 0.08 0.10 0.07 0.07

Soc+Rad Left over Voters b mean 0.16 0.02 0.18 0.21 0.92

std 0.08 0.01 0.05 0.06 0.03

a Based on Census b Based on EI estimates

36

TABLE 7. SOCIALIST PARTIES AND ELECTORAL SUCCESS

Extent of male suffrage

None or Partial Quasi-Universal or Universal

Britain before 1885 Flemish Belgium after 1893

No Belgium before 1870s (Catholic) Germany 1890-1933

(Catholic) Germany b. 1890† France till 1900s

Norway before 1900 France after 1910

Sweden b. 1900 New South Wales b. 1890s

Netherlands b. 1900s Switzerland b. 1900

Unions support USA

socialist parties

Britain 1900-18 Australia

Belgium 1870s-1893 Britain after 1918

Yes (Protestant) Germany b. 1890† Wallon Belgium after 1893

Italy b. 1918 (Protestant) Germany 1890-1933

Netherlands 1900s-1910s Italy after 1918

Norway 1899-1900 Netherlands after 1918

Sweden 1900-11 Norway after 1900

Spain 1931-1936

Sweden after 1911

Switzerland in 1900s

In Italics: Cases with electorally successful socialist parties.

† Universal suffrage in place by Repressive Antisocialist Law of 1878 in place

37

G

GGG

B

G

B

G

UK

G

CHBNTF

G

CHNTBUK

G

CH

B

NTNUK

B

CHNTN

G

CH

B

CANUK

AUT

NT

B

F

NZSWECH

AUTG

N

CA

NT

NZ

SW E

CH

AUT

B

F

N

UK

FI

G

CA

FI

NZ

SWE

CH

FI

NT

N

AUT

FI

F

UKUK

CA

FI

NZ

SWE

CH

BG

N

AUT

FI

NT

AUT

F

NZCH

SWE

SWE

N

FI

IC

AUT

CA

FI

NT

SW ECH

NT

N

UK

AUTOFI

F

IC

NZCH

O

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SWE

B

N

SW E

AUT

FI

NT

NZCH

UK

O

IC

UKFI

F

N

SWE

UK

G

G

AUT

B

NT

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O

FI

IC

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AUT

F

GNZ

SW E

CH

AUT

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NT

UK

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G

N

AUT

IC

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B

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SWE

GG

FI

GICNT

NAUT

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CA

NZ

CH

UK

B

FI

F

N

SWEAUT

ICNT

NZ

B

FI

CH

AUT

CA

SWE

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CH

S WEO

CA

FIF

N

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B

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B

CA

G

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UK

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UK

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SWE

CA

G

NZN

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B

CA

FI

F

S WEO

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UK

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NZ

S WE

AUT

G

NO

CA

FI

F

AUT

CA

IC

NT

NZ

CH

SWE

UK

CA

G

N

AUT

O

FI

NZ

UK

F

IC

NTCH

CAF

SWEA UT

GNZNO

FI

SWEUK

O

IC

NTCH

AUT

CAFI

G

NT

NZ

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N

SWE

A UT

CA

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UK

AUT

O

FI

NZ

CH

GS WEAUT

NT

N

FIC

NZ

O

CAFI

IC

SWE

CH

UK

AUT

CA

G

F

NT

NZN

NT

SWE

A UTO

FI

G

CH

UK

AUT

CA

DK

NZN

SWEO

FNT

AUT

DK

FI

G

NZ

CH

UK

CA

F

SW E

NTN

A UT

O

DK

GNZ

FI

SWE

CH

UK

AUT

CA

F

NZNOG

NT

SWE

O

FI

CH

AUT

NZ

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F

N

UK

010

2030

4050

60P

erce

nt V

otes

Soc

ial D

emoc

racy

(ov

er T

urno

ut)

1870 1880 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990 2000Year

bandwidth = .8

Figure 1. Evolution of Social Democratic Vote 1871-1997

0.00

0.10

0.20

0.30

0.40

0.50

0.60

0.70

0.80

0.90

1.00

0.00

10.00

20.00

30.00

40.00

50.00

60.00

1906 1910-I 1910-II 1918 1922 1923 1924 1929 1931 1935

Per

cen

t of

Lab

or V

oter

s in

Pre

viou

s E

lect

ion

Vot

ing

Lab

or i

n M

arke

d

Ele

ctio

n (

Mea

n a

nd

Sta

nd

ard

Dev

iati

on)

Per

cen

t E

lect

orat

e V

otin

g L

abou

r (C

olu

mn

Bar

s)

Election Year

Figure 2A. Labor Vote: Total and Continuity

38

0.00

0.10

0.20

0.30

0.40

0.50

0.60

0.70

0.80

0.90

1.00

1906 1910-I 1910-II 1918 1922 1923 1924 1929 1931 1935

Per

cen

t of

Non

-Vot

ers

in P

revi

ous

Ele

ctio

n V

otin

g L

abou

r in

Mar

ked

E

lect

ion

(M

ean

an

d S

tan

dar

d D

evia

tion

)

Election Year

Figure 2B. Abstainers Voting UK Labour

0.00

0.10

0.20

0.30

0.40

0.50

0.60

0.70

0.80

0.90

1.00

1906 1910-I 1910-II 1918 1922 1923 1924 1929 1931 1935

Per

cen

t of

Lib

eral

Vot

ers

in P

revi

ous

Ele

ctio

n V

otin

g fo

r L

abou

rin

Mar

ked

E

lect

ion

(M

ean

an

d S

tan

dar

d D

evia

tion

)

Election Year

Figure 2C. Liberal Voters Shifting to Labour

39

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

0.00

10.00

20.00

30.00

40.00

50.00

60.00

Per

cen

t of

SP

D V

oter

s in

Pre

viou

s E

lect

ion

s V

otin

g fo

r SP

D i

n M

arke

d

Ele

ctio

n (

Mea

n a

nd

Sta

nd

ard

Dev

iati

on)

Per

cen

t of

SP

D V

otes

(O

ver

Tu

rnou

t) (

Col

um

n B

ars)

Election Year

Figure 3A. Continuity in SPD Vote, 1871-1933

0.00

0.10

0.20

0.30

0.40

0.50

0.60

0.70

0.80

0.90

1.00

Per

cen

t of

Non

-Vot

ers

in P

revi

ous

Ele

ctio

n V

otin

g in

Mar

ked

Ele

ctio

n f

or

SPD

(M

ean

an

d S

tan

dar

d D

evia

tion

)

Election Year

Figure 3B. Mobilization of New SPD Voters

40

0.00

0.10

0.20

0.30

0.40

0.50

0.60

0.70

0.80

0.90

1.00

0.00

10.00

20.00

30.00

40.00

50.00

60.00

70.00

1902 1905 1908 1911 1914.1 1914.2 1917 1920 1921 1924 1928 1932 1936 1940

Per

cen

t of

Lab

or V

oter

s in

Pre

viou

s E

lect

ion

Vot

ing

in M

arke

d E

lect

ion

for

SA

P (

Mea

n a

nd

Sta

nd

ard

Dev

iati

on)

Per

cen

t of

SA

P V

otes

(ov

er T

urn

out)

(C

olu

mn

Bar

s)

Election Year

Figure 4A. Vote Share and Continuity Patterns among SPD

0.00

0.10

0.20

0.30

0.40

0.50

0.60

0.70

0.80

0.90

1.00

1902 1905 1908 1911 1914.1 1914.2 1917 1920 1921 1924 1928 1932 1936 1940

Per

cen

t of

Lab

or V

oter

s in

Pre

viou

s E

lect

ion

Vot

ing

in M

arke

d E

lect

ion

for

SP

D (

Mea

n a

nd

Sta

nd

ard

Dev

iati

on)

Election Year

Figure 4B. Mobilization of new voters to SAP

41

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

90

0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 3500 4000 4500 5000 5500 6000 6500 7000 7500 8000 8500 9000 9500 10000

Perc

ent

Annual Income in Kr.(Dashed line mark population quintiles)

Figure 5 . Party Vote by Income in Stockholm's Local Elections, 1913

Turnout (1913) Social Democrats as Percent of Valid Votes

0.0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

0

10

20

30

40

50

1889 1893 1898 1902 1906 1910 1914 1919 1924 1928

Est

imat

ed P

rop

orti

on o

f So

cial

ist

Vot

ers

in P

revi

ous

Ele

ctio

n V

otin

g So

cial

ist p

arti

es in

Mar

ked

Ele

ctio

n (

Mea

n a

nd

Sta

nd

ard

Dev

iati

on)

Per

cen

t of

Soc

iali

st V

otes

(O

ver

Tu

rnou

t) (

Col

um

n B

ars)

Figure 6. Continuity of Socialist Vote in France, 1902-1928