Electoral Competition between Social Democracy and the Populist Radical Right: How Welfare Regimes Shape Electoral Outcomes

The Legacy of the Social Democratic Regime: Competition With High Stakes

In the social democratic regime, the welfare model embodies the principle of ‘inclusive solidarity’ and extends equal social benefits to all citizens. This model emerged in Scandinavia in the early twentieth century and was a product of SDPs’ ability to form cross-class alliances in support of the universal welfare state (Esping-Andersen, 1990a, 1990b). As a result, the median voter developed stakes in expanding/preserving the universal system (Esping-Andersen, 1990a: 117; Korpi and Palme, 2003: 443), and SDPs emerged as the undisputed ‘owners’ of the welfare state issue (Jensen and Seeberg, 2014).

However, alongside the inclusive legacy, the social democratic regime also has an exclusive tradition. Although SDPs adopted pro-immigration positions in the 1980s (Kitschelt, 1994), they played a key role in establishing a ‘welfare nationalist’ legacy decades earlier (Kuisma, 2007). For example, in the 1930s the Swedish SDP took over the conservative term ‘Folkhemmet’ (the People’s Home) to establish a link between inclusive welfare and an exclusive national identity (Spektorowski and Mizrachi, 2004). Likewise, SDPs made similar associations between the homogeneous ‘people’ and the welfare state in Denmark (Siim and Meret, 2016), Norway (Kuisma, 2007), and Finland (Keskinen, 2016).

The welfare nationalist legacy appears to have shaped ‘perceptions of normality’ in the social democratic regime (Larsen, 2020). Nordic citizens still show tendencies of combining a high degree of in-group solidarity with a lower solidarity with ethnic outsiders (Eger, 2010; Finseraas, 2008; Schmidt and Spies, 2014: 526). Thus, while some scholars argue that the countries in the social democratic regime can ‘absorb immigrants with less groaning and moaning from [. . .] native populations’ (Crepaz and Damron, 2009: 456), it seems equally plausible to assume that the legacies of universalism and welfare nationalism have collided with the high levels of immigration in the Nordic countries in recent decades (Brochmann, 2022).

Universal welfare, in principle, implies that natives and non-natives receive equal benefits, while native-to-non-native redistribution is significant (Ennser-Jedenastik, 2018). Accordingly, immigration can lead to increased costs that potentially threaten existing benefits (Kitschelt and McGann, 1995: 269). Consequently, while immigrants’ degree of inclusion differs within the social democratic regime (Beramendi and Rehm, 2016; Borevi, 2014), it is likely that many Nordic voters perceive a conflict between immigration and the conventional view of the welfare state as a crucial aspect of national identity (Kuisma, 2007). Therefore, rather than assuming that universalism breeds tolerance, it is reasonable to expect that the exclusive legacy of the social democratic regime has enhanced a feeling of ‘relative gratification’ among the citizens (Mols and Jetten, 2016: 278) – that is, a belief that the Nordic in-group is more deserving of welfare than immigrants, coupled with fears that immigrants threaten existing benefits. Against this background, I argue that we should see two competitive dynamics emerging in the social democratic regime.

The first dynamic relates to welfare politics. PRRPs in the social democratic regime strongly endorse the redistributive pillars of the welfare state (Enggist and Pinggera, 2022; Jungar and Jupskås, 2014), and argue that a homogeneous nation-state is essential for maintaining them (Loxbo, 2022). Moreover, to politicize the trade-off between universal welfare and immigration, a key slogan of both the Danish People’s Party and the Sweden Democrats is that they are the only genuine carriers of the social democratic welfare tradition (Meret and Siim, 2013: 138; Norocel, 2016). Thus, the welfare discourse of Nordic PRRPs mimics some of SDPs’ traditional stances (Loxbo, 2022) and explicitly seeks to undermine their credibility as defenders of the welfare state in the current age of migration. Put differently, PRRPs exploit (and distort) the legacies of exclusive national solidarity that upheld SDPs’ cross-class alliances in support of the welfare state (cf. Rennwald and Pontusson, 2021: 15). Therefore, given the welfare nationalist legacies of the social democratic regime, PRRPs’ discourse on the welfare state appears well suited to evoke feelings of relative gratification among the median voter and is, consequently, likely to have similar effects across various socio-economic groups (Siim and Meret, 2016). Specifically, if support for PRRPs’ welfare politics is rooted in a cultural legacy of strong in-group solidarity, it should transcend class boundaries and be less influenced by individuals’ economic interests or grievances. Therefore, I argue that that the more PRRPs’ emphasize welfare relative to SDPs, the higher the probability that they undermine SDPs reputation as the primary welfare party and appear as a credible alternative themselves. This leads to the first hypothesis for the social democratic regime:

The second dynamic relates to immigration. If the inflow of immigrants is the catalyst that enables PRRPs to challenge SDPs’ reputation in the welfare policy domain, SDPs should be able to retain some credibility among the voters if they, at least partly, accommodate PRRPs’ anti-immigration position. While some scholars argue that this is a risky and counterproductive strategy (Krause et al., 2022), others show that it has the potential to strengthen support for the left bloc as a whole (Hjorth and Larsen, 2022). It also appears as if this strategy has been successful in Denmark, where the Danish SDP has adopted a tough stance on immigration and the Danish People’s Party imploded in the last elections (Etzerodt and Kongshøj, 2022). Accordingly, while SDPs generally run the risk of repelling pro-immigration voters if they accommodate PRRPs’ anti-immigration position, I argue that the legacies of the social democratic regime should imply that the net effect is positive. Therefore, the second hypothesis for the social democratic regime is:

The Legacy of the Conservative Regime: Competition With Lower Stakes

The historical legacies of the conservative regime have generated a different competitive logic. With few exceptions, the construction of these welfare states resulted from consensual bargains in ‘red-black coalitions’ between Christian democratic parties and SDPs after World War II (Manow et al., 2018: 6–7). However, as SDPs participated less frequently in governments, primarily Christian democratic parties became central to the construction of the welfare state. Thus, SDPs in this context have no apparent ‘ownership’ over the welfare state issue, and PRRPs’ strategies in this policy domain are just as likely – or even more likely – to target Christian Democratic parties (Abou-Chadi et al., 2022).

Moreover, social benefits in the conservative welfare regime were (are) tied to individual contributions that differed between professions and, therefore, resulted in a ‘labyrinth of status-specific insurance funds’ (Esping-Andersen, 1990a: 108). Hence, as benefits depend on individual contributions, the welfare state structure is less sensitive to immigration and provides little appeal to the in–out group conflict that PRRPs exploit in the social democratic regime (Ennser-Jedenastik, 2018; Reeskens and van Oorschot, 2012: 127). While this implies that electoral competition over welfare between PRRPs and SDPs should be less prominent in the conservative regime, I argue that we should see intensified competition in the margins of the electorate.

Research shows that the somewhat fragmented provision of welfare in the conservative regime makes economically exposed people more likely than in universal welfare systems to demand economic compensation when immigration increases (Finseraas, 2008: 414; Leibrecht et al., 2011; Schmidt and Spies, 2014: 524). While SDPs traditionally appeal to these voters, they have increasingly turned their focus to the investment-oriented welfare demands of the middle class (Gingrich and Häusermann, 2015; Rennwald, 2020; Rennwald and Pontusson, 2021). By contrast, PRRPs exclusively focus on consumption-oriented policies of redistribution (Busemeyer et al., 2022; Enggist and Pinggera, 2022). While PRRPs in practice tend to see economic outsiders as ‘undeserving’ (Rathgeb, 2021: 654), research shows that economic grievances have grown in importance as a predictor of radical right support (Abou-Chadi et al., 2022: 380). Additionally, research shows that voters in precarious economic situations are particularly prone to experience feelings of ‘relative deprivation’ and make unfavourable comparisons with immigrants (Im, 2021; Stoetzer et al., 2023). Given that PRRPs in the conservative regime often claim that they seek to expand social benefits for the ‘common man’ (de Koster et al., 2013; Ennser-Jedenastik, 2016: 414; Fenger, 2018), while rolling them back for undeserving immigrants (Rathgeb, 2021), they simultaneously target the economic grievances and desires to exclude immigrants among such voters. Therefore, I expect that PRRPs’ emphasis on welfare should enable them to compete with SDPs for the votes of people who feel economically left behind. Thus, the first hypothesis for the conservative regime is:

However, competition over immigration should be a different story in the conservative regime. The equity-based welfare state structure implies that immigration and social benefits are more separate political issues than in the social democratic regime. Therefore, SDPs should only marginally appeal to people who care about preserving the welfare state if they adopt a tough stance on immigration (Ennser-Jedenastik, 2018). Accordingly, given that SDPs in the conservative regime lack a ‘welfare nationalist’ legacy to fall back on, it is reasonable to assume that they will alienate more voters than they convince if they proceed down this road (Krause et al., 2022). When considering SDPs’ competition over immigration in the conservative regime, we should, therefore, expect that:

Measuring Electoral Competition Over Welfare and Immigration

As previously stated, I argue that PRRPs challenge SDPs by emphasizing the welfare state issue, whereas SDPs compete with PRRPs by accommodating their anti-immigrant position. To operationalize these competitive strategies, I build on the party manifestos coded by the Marpor (Volkens et al., 2020).

First, issue saliency denotes the relative importance parties attach to a whole issue dimension, regardless of their position (Budge, 1999). Following the standard approach in the literature (see, for example, Abou-Chadi and Wagner, 2019; Wagner and Meyer, 2016), I measure welfare saliency using a logit scale measure of each party’s combined emphasis on the positive category ‘welfare state expansion (per504)’ and the negative category ‘welfare limitation (per505)’ (Lowe et al., 2011: 133–134). I then operationalized PRRP welfare competition as these parties’ emphasis on the whole issue dimension of welfare relative to SDPs’ emphasis – that is, a proportional measure where higher values imply that PRRPs’ emphasis approach or surpass SDPs’ emphasis.

Horn et al. (2017: 409–412) show that the item ‘welfare expansion’ is a valid measure of parties’ pledges to expand or preserve redistributive policies such as pensions, elderly care, and health care. ³ However, by also including the item ‘welfare limitation’ – that is, pledges to reduce social security and services – I seek to account for PRRPs’ ambition to roll back benefits for certain segments of the population. While the measure of PRRPs’ welfare competition provides no information about SDPs’ or PRRPs’ exact proposals on welfare I maintain that it is one of the few available measures that can approximate how much PRRPs challenge SDPs by emphasizing welfare state issues (Below, I account for alternative measures from the Chapel Hill expert survey (CHES)).

Moreover, given that the Marpor coding categories covers opposite sides of the same issue (e.g. pro/anti welfare), it is important to note that a logit measure of saliency becomes more similar (ultimately identical) to a logit scale of position, the more one-sided a party’s issue-emphasis is (Lowe et al., 2011: 133). Section B in the supplementary material provides more details on the logit measure of saliency and how it relates to logit scales measuring parties’ position. ⁴ Additionally, I provide robustness tests showing that models with positional measures produce qualitatively similar results as those with the saliency measure (Figure S3).

Second, I measure SDPs’ and PRRPs’ immigration position as logit scales of position (Lowe et al., 2011: 131) – the proportion of negative mentions of ‘multiculturalism’ relative to positive mentions (Krause et al., 2022: 3; Spoon and Klüver, 2020). Based on this, I operationalize the variable, SDP immigration competition (accommodation) as SDPs’ position (coded in a negative direction) relative to PRRPs’ position – thus, higher values represent more accommodation.

While the difference between the negative and positive categories of ‘multiculturalism’ does not perfectly cover all mentions of immigration in parties’ manifestos (Wagner and Meyer, 2016: 90), they account for the core of nativist ideology – cultural homogeneity, assimilation, and the rejection of minority rights (Abou-Chadi, 2016: 425). Moreover, I compared the logit scales above to the measures constructed by Dancygier and Margalit (2020), which explicitly focus on immigration (but in fewer countries and a shorter time frame than this study). The results show that the measures employed here correlates with Dancygier and Margalit’s measures of parties’ position on integration – SDPs (r = 0.75) and PRRPs (r = 0.8). Thus, when SDPs accommodate PRRPs’ position on immigration, they seem to primarily adapt to PRRPs’ focus on stricter measures for immigrants already living in the country.

Finally, I also test the same models using measures from the CHES; I operationalized welfare competition as the relative difference between PRRPs’ and SDPs’ position on redistribution (Harteveld, 2016), and immigration competition as the relative difference between SDPs’ and PRRPs’ position on multiculturalism. Given that the Marpor measures of saliency and position are qualitatively similar (for PRRP welfare competition), it is reasonable to argue that the CHES-measures of position are alternative indicators of the same competitive dynamic. Also, the robustness test show that the models with CHES-measures report very similar results as those with Marpor measures, even though the CHES-measures do not cover Norway and Switzerland (see Supplement E and robustness tests).

Independent Variables and Controls

I utilize three individual-level variables from the ESS to operationalize the hypotheses. First, to test hypotheses H1ab–H2ab, I interact the measures of competition with an ESS-measure that separates between economically exposed people – individuals who, during the last week, were unemployed and/or permanently sick or disabled – and all other voters. When considering the social democratic regime, H1a–H1b expects similar effects for both groups, whereas H2a (conservative regime) only expects a positive effect of PRRP welfare competition among the most economically exposed (H2b expects a negative effect for both groups). Additionally, I also test these hypotheses by interacting with voters’ social class. This variable separates between working-class (all skilled craftspeople and all unskilled, routine employees) (1) and all others (0) (Oesch, 2006).

Second, to test H3–H4, I follow previous studies and measure anti-immigration attitudes as a composite scale (Harteveld et al., 2021; Schmidt and Spies, 2014), based on respondents’ responses to the following two questions: ‘Would you say it is generally bad or good for [country]’s economy that people come to live here from other countries?’; ‘Would you say that [country]’s cultural life is generally undermined or enriched by people coming to live here from other countries?’ The items scale well (α = 0.74), and I recoded the variable to run from 0 to 10.

The analyses also include standard socio-demographic controls such as gender, age, education (in years), and residence unit (city, town, suburb, village). Moreover, I control for respondents’ left-right placements, ⁵ and pro-redistribution attitudes. ⁶ Additionally, while immigration has been high in all countries, I control for Eurostat’s data on the crude rate of net migration in all countries for each year between 2002 and 2018. Finally, Abou-Chadi et al. (2020) show that parties’ positional shifts reflect changes in issue saliency in the party system. Therefore, I utilize the same operationalizations as above to control for all other parties’ mean emphasis on welfare and immigration. Table S3 presents summary statistics.

Testing the Hypotheses: Do Welfare Regimes Shape Electoral Outcomes?

As previously stated, the statistical models estimate the probability of four vote choices – LGPs, SDPs, PRRPs, or CRPs (baseline outcome). To test the hypotheses, the models assess whether the impact of the two competitive strategies depends on one another, and, therefore, include interaction-terms with PRRP/SDP competition simultaneously. However, given that regimes are studied separately, we get a total of 24 models. Therefore, I present the table of results in the Supplementary material (Table S1) and base the conclusions on marginal effects that are independent of the baseline outcome (unlike the coefficients in the tables). To ensure that single countries do not drive the ‘regime-effects’, all analyses control for jackknife analyses (Tables S6 and S7, Figures S10–S16). At the end of this section, I further discuss the robustness of the findings referring to additional studies in the Supplementary material.

Within the social democratic regime, H1a posits that PRRPs win votes (while SDPs lose votes), the more PRRPs emphasize welfare relative to SDPs. Conversely, H1b suggests that SDPs can turn the tables around by accommodating PRRPs’ position on immigration. As for the conservative regime, H2a posits that PRRPs’ competition over welfare enables them to compete with SDPs over the votes of the most economically exposed, while H2b posits that SDPs generally lose votes, the more they seek to accommodate PRRPs’ anti-immigration position.

Figure 2 tests these hypotheses by comparing marginal effects among voters classified as economically exposed (1) and not (0) (Figure S1 shows main effects and Figure S2 shows interactions with social class). When analysing Figure 2, I first discuss PRRPs’ welfare competition (H1a and H2a, upper panels) and then proceed to SDPs’ competition over immigration (H1b and H2b, lower panels).

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Figure 2.

Marginal Effects of PRRP Welfare Competition (a–b, e–f) and SDP Immigration Competition (c–d, g–h) by Other (0) and Economically Exposed (1) Voters.

The marginal effects in panels (a) and (b) in Figure 2 support H1a. Within the social democratic regime, we observe a 5–6% increase in the probability of citizens in different economic situations (others and economically exposed) voting for PRRPs, along with a similar decrease in the probability of these groups voting for SDPs (main effects are shown in Figure S1). These effects occur if PRRPs move one unit towards more emphasis on welfare relative to SDPs. However, as we can infer from the trendlines in Figure 1, the ‘true’ effects are likely to have been even greater. For instance, if a PRRP moves one standard deviation from the mean towards more welfare competition, we observe an increased probability of around 14% of a vote for PRRPs (voters in general), and an of 8% decrease in the probability of a vote for SDPs (resulting in a difference of ~ 22% between PRRPs and SDPs).

Similarly, the findings in panels (e) and (f) provide support for H2a in the conservative regime. The marginal effects indicate that when PRRPs’ competition over welfare intensifies, the probability of economically exposed people voting for them increases by around 2.5% (~7% of the sample in the conservative regime are categorized as economically exposed). Yet, in contrast to the social democratic regime, marginal effects are positive but not significant for SDPs, while CRPs appear to lose support (Abou-Chadi et al., 2022). Nonetheless, if a PRRP in the conservative regime increases its emphasis on welfare with one standard deviation towards more, as in the estimation above, we observe a 6% increase in the probability that economically exposed will vote for PRRPs and a statistically significant 4% increase in the probability of them supporting SDPs. Thus, both SDPs and PRRPs stand out as potential winners.

When comparing the two welfare regimes in Figure 2, electoral responses differ rather systematically. In the social democratic regime, PRRPs’ emphasis on welfare (relative to SDPs) has similar effects across different social groups (also with social class, depicted in Figure S2). This suggests that PRRPs’ welfare emphasis undermines the strong standing of SDPs in this policy domain, disrupting their cross-class alliances around the welfare state. However, the results in the conservative regime indicate that economic grievances among small groups drive the outcomes. These regime-differences are robust to jackknife resampling at the country-level (as shown in Figure S11), indicating that countries within regimes do not drive the results. ⁸ Consequently, Figure 2 reveals a consistent difference between the welfare regimes, aligning with both H1a and H2a.

Turning to the lower panels (c, d, g and h) in Figure 2, the results also support H1b and H2b. The marginal effects in panels (c) and (d) indicate that SDPs in the social democratic regime gain votes, as they adopt PRRPs’ anti-immigration position. A unit’s change in this direction leads to an estimated increase in the probability of an SDP-vote with ~ 2% in both groups (H1b). However, in the conservative regime, the results in panels (g) and (h) show that SDPs lose votes when pursuing this strategy (H2b). Still, jackknife analyses reveal that only the effects for the most economically exposed voters remain significant in both regimes (panels D and H in Figure S11). Thus, while the results back H1b and H2b, support is less conclusive than for H1a and H2a.

The remaining hypotheses concern how competition between SDPs and PRRPs interacts with anti-immigration sentiments. In the social democratic regime, H3 posits that the strength of anti-immigration attitudes increases the probability of voting for PRRPs, the more PRRPs emphasize welfare relative to SDPs, but that these attitudes are weak predictors of voting for SDPs when SDPs accommodate PRRPs’ immigration position. In contrast, H4 predicts null-effects in the conservative regime. Figure 3 illustrates the marginal effects that test these hypotheses.

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Figure 3.

Marginal Effects of PRRP Welfare Competition and SDP Immigration Competition by Anti-Immigration Attitudes: (a) Social-Democratic Regime (PRRP Welfare Comp), (b) Conservative Regime (PRRP Welfare Comp), (c) Social-Democratic Regime (SDP Immigration Comp) and (d) Conservative Regime (SDP Immigration Comp).

The findings in Figure 3 align with H3–H4. Specifically, the results demonstrate that the only clear effects concern PRRPs’ competition over welfare in the social democratic regime. As shown in panel (a), one unit’s increase in PRRPs’ emphasis on welfare relative to SDPs emphasis leads to a higher probability of a PRRP-vote among voters who are more critical of immigration. Notably, we see the most substantial effects among people with the strongest anti-immigration sentiments (+ 12% probability of a vote for PRRPs) but also that significant effects occur already around the mean value of anti-immigration attitudes (+ 5%). In contrast, probabilities of voting for SDPs are constantly negative, with a weak association to voters’ views on immigration (~ 6% below 0).

The findings in panel (a) hold up to jackknife analyses (Figure S13) and a range of other robustness checks (outlined below). Consequently, we can conclude that PRRPs’ competition over welfare with SDPs is a significant factor in mobilizing the core electorate of PRRPs within the social democratic regime. In addition, the findings in panel (c) confirm the expectation set forth in H3 that SDPs’ attempts to compete with PRRPs over immigration have only a minor impact on the voting probabilities of people with anti-immigration attitudes. Although we observe a small positive effect in panel (c), it is unrelated to the intensity of anti-immigration attitudes. Moreover, the effect does not withstand jackknife analyses, and, consequently, cannot be applied to all countries in the social democratic regime. Thus, the evidence supports H3.

Turning to the conservative regime, effects are largely consistent with H4 (a null-effect). Panel (b) indicates a tendency for both PRRP and SDPs to gain when PRRPs compete over welfare, while panel (d) suggests that SDPs lose votes when attempting to co-opt PRRPs’ anti-immigration position. However, jackknife analyses reveal that single countries drive both effects and, therefore, that the findings cannot be generalized to the entire conservative regime.

Robustness Tests

I subject the analysis in the previous section to an extensive set of robustness checks. First, (as shown above) the most important findings hold when using jackknife resampling at the country level (Table S6, Figures S10–S16) and the remaining analyses in Supplement D show that they also hold when using jackknife resampling at the survey (ESS) level (Table S7). Second, mixed-effects models with a dependent variable that only separates between votes for SDPs (1) and PRRPs (0) (Abou-Chadi et al., 2022: 374) do not alter the findings depicted in Figures 2 and 3, although marginal effects differ somewhat when other voting alternatives are excluded from the analyses (Table S5, Figures S8 and S9). Third, in Supplement E, I substituted the Marpor measures with measures of competition based on parties’ positions on redistribution and multiculturalism from the CHES (Table S8). The marginal effects depicted in Figures S17 and S18 show the same findings as Figures 2 and 3. However, the CHES-measures indicate that SDPs in both regimes can benefit from taking a tough stance on ‘multiculturalism’ (but this effect is not robust to jackknife analyses). Fourth, the analyses in Supplement F control for time-variant effects by estimating the same models as those in Table S1 before (ESS 1–4) and after (ESS- 5–9) the 2008 economic crises. The main findings remain unaltered, but the results provide additional insights into the development of the conservative regime. In this context, the results (Figure S19) indicate that PRRPs only become a serious competitor for the votes of the economically exposed after the 2008 economic crisis. This finding aligns with research showing that economic grievances have grown in importance as a predictor of radical right support (Abou-Chadi et al., 2022: 380). Fifth, Supplement G tests whether the electoral dynamics shown in this study are unique to SDPs and PRRPs, or if similar patterns emerge when studying competition between CRPs and PRRPs. The analyses in Figures S21 and S22 show that the effects in the study are unique in the social democratic regime. However, PRRPs’ competition with CRPs follows a similar pattern to their competition with SDPs in the conservative regime (Abou-Chadi et al., 2022). Finally, in Supplement H a mixed model tests if PRRPs’ attempts to compete over welfare influence the intensity of voters’ anti-immigration attitudes, when also controlling for PRRPs’ stance on immigration (Table S9). Although these analyses go beyond the scope of this study, the results further support the main argument. Within the social democratic regime, the findings indicate that PRRPs’ competition over welfare is a more significant factor in predicting anti-immigration views than their position on immigration, while the opposite holds within the conservative regime.