The Social Democratic Problem with Inequality: How Mainstream Left Parties Lost Their Issue Ownership Over Inequality and How it Matters for Their Electoral Support

For a long time, parties on the left and especially social democratic parties had an undeniable reputation for being the most competent to handle issues related to economic inequality and redistribution more generally. In fact, this topic has been a defining block of their ideology and their self-conception. Recently, social democratic parties have been struggling electorally even more than other mainstream parties. We argue that one crucial piece in the explanation of this phenomenon is that they no longer are seen as the most competent to deal with economic inequality and redistribution. In particular, challenger parties on the fringes of the party system have become stronger on these issues. Both left and right-wing populist parties put a lot of emphasis on questions of social justice and the defense of the “small people” in their discourse and are thus seen as challenging traditional social democratic parties in their core topic of competence. Without this core reputation, it becomes difficult for social democratic parties to attract votes as we know that issue competence is a central factor in explaining party choice. We test our argument with newly collected comparative survey evidence on the perceived competence of parties to handle economic inequality (14 countries) and accompany this data with earlier CSES data (2006-2011) on perceived competence for the most important topic. We explore not only which parties are seen as most competent but also the consequence of these ascribed issue ownership has for party choice.