1
In all western industrializing countries, except one, socialist, social
democratic, or labor parties became major political players in the course of the
twentieth century.
1
The first durable socialist party was established in Germany
in 1875. By the early 1900s, every Western European, North American, and
Australasian country had a socialist, social democratic, or labor party.
2
After
World War II such parties gathered, on average, a larger proportion of the vote
in national elections than any other party family—a feat that continues to the
present.
The story of socialist party emergence and consolidation resembles a
natural experiment, and as a result, has a relevance for social scientists even
beyond its enormous substantive importance. All social democratic parties were
based on the class cleavage. All appealed to manual workers as their core
constituency. All began with, or adopted, political programs demanding
manhood (later, universal) suffrage, greater economic equality, equal political
rights, and a greater role for the state in the economy.
3
Yet socialist parties varied
across the entire range of the spectrum from revolutionary to reformist. Some
had little or no toleration for reform under capitalism, but demanded instead an
immediate transition to socialism, which could only be accomplished by a
complete dissolution of the existing capitalist and political order. At the opposite
extreme, others were mildly reformist, aiming for working-class representation
in the legislature, restriction of immigration, and/or marginal welfare reforms.
How can one explain this variation? This is a well trodden field – indeed
part of the appeal of this question is precisely the fact that it has attracted the
attention of two generations of social scientists. With the help of a data set for
seventeen countries for the period 1900 to 1914, collected over the past several
years, we are in a position to adjudicate among alternative explanations.
Three bodies of theory bear on this topic. The first seeks the sources of
socialist orientation in the character of the regime. Regimes that are liberal and
democratic breed reformism. Regimes that are illiberal and undemocratic breed
radicalism. The second looks to coalitions. The more socialist parties were drawn
into coalitions with other, less radical, groups, the less radical they were. The
third examines the strength and durability of status differences in the expectation
that rigid status systems engender radicalism and social egalitarian systems
engender reformism. We find that each theory is valid, but not for reasons
supposed in the literatures.
In the next section we derive hypotheses from these theories. In the
following sections we evaluate their validity.
1
The exception is, of course, the United States.
2
We use these terms interchangeably in this paper
3
Ideological variations among social democratic parties are smaller than those among parties in
the other major party families.
Convention