A Crisis of Social Democracy in Europe? An Answer from the Citizens’ Perspective

Abstract

This article analyses the public support for the social model of democracy by focusing on the gap between what citizens expect democracy to deliver in the social realm and how they do evaluate its achievement in the practice. Using data from the European Social Survey Round 6 (2012), the results reveal that individuals with a lower socio-economic background, those positioned on the left and those who are more distrustful of political institutions tend to be more supportive of social democracy, while they evaluate its performance more negatively. The data also demonstrate that individuals’ social expectations and evaluations are moderated by their country’s institutional configuration of the welfare state, and more particularly, its degree of universalism. Overall, the results support the intuition that the alleged crisis of social democracy does not exist generally across Europe, but only in those countries where the welfare state has been unable to close the gap between expectations and evaluations.