Social democracy

**Social democracy** is a political, social and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal democratic polity and a capitalist-oriented mixed economy. The protocols and norms used to accomplish this involve a commitment to representative and participatory democracy, measures for income redistribution, regulation of the economy in the general interest and social-welfare provisions. Due to longstanding governance by social-democratic parties during the post-war consensus and their influence on socioeconomic policy in Northern and Western Europe, social democracy became associated with Keynesianism, the Nordic model, the social-liberal paradigm and welfare states within political circles in the late 20th century. It has been described as the most common form of Western or modern socialism as well as the reformist wing of democratic socialism.

While having socialism as a long-term goal, social democracy seeks to humanize capitalism and create the conditions for it to lead to greater democratic, egalitarian and solidaristic outcomes. It is characterized by a commitment to policies aimed at curbing inequality, eliminating oppression of underprivileged groups and eradicating poverty as well as support for universally accessible public services like care for the elderly, child care, education, health care and workers' compensation. It often has strong connections with the labour movement and trade unions, being supportive of collective bargaining rights for workers and measures to extend decision-making beyond politics into the economic sphere in the form of co-determination for employees and stakeholders.

Social democracy originated as an ideology within the socialist and labour movements, whose goal at different times has been a social revolution to move away from capitalism to a post-capitalist economy such as socialism, a peaceful revolution as in the case of evolutionary socialism, or the establishment and support of a welfare state. Its origins lie in the 1860s as a revolutionary socialism associated with orthodox Marxism. Starting in the 1890s, there was a dispute between committed revolutionary social democrats such as Rosa Luxemburg and reformist social democrats as well as Marxist revisionists such as Eduard Bernstein, who supported a more gradual approach grounded in liberal democracy and cross-class cooperation, with Karl Kautsky representing a centrist position. By the 1920s, social democracy became the dominant political tendency along with communism within the international socialist movement, representing a form of democratic socialism with the aim of achieving socialism peacefully.

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 parliaments. 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. 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, disagreeing with the latter on topics such as their opposition to liberal democracy whilst sharing common ideological roots.

In the early post-war era, social democrats in Western Europe rejected the Stalinist political and economic model then current in the Soviet Union, committing themselves either to an alternative path to socialism or to a compromise between capitalism and socialism. 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. 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, without abolishing factor markets, private property and wage labour.

With the rise in popularity of neoliberalism and the New Right by the 1980s, many social-democratic parties incorporated the Third Way ideology, aiming to fuse economic liberalism with social-democratic welfare policies. By the 2010s, social-democratic parties that accepted triangulation and the neoliberal shift in policies such as austerity, deregulation, free trade, privatization and welfare reforms such as workfare experienced a drastic decline as the Third Way had largely fallen out of favour in a phenomenon known as Pasokification. 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, alienating 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.