Christoph Arndt and Kees van Kersbergen reflect on their article ‘Social democracy after the Third Way: restoration or renewal?’, available now on Policy & Politics fast track.

What do social democratic parties do after they regain power after the Third Way? This was the guiding question for our study of the public policies of the current Danish social democratic government (2011-2015). The Third Way (TW), with Britain’s New Labour as its forerunner, was at first a successful strategy for many European social democratic parties to regain power after long bourgeois incumbencies in the 1980s and 1990s. However, it usually ended in electoral disaster since TW policies did not square with the preferences and values of many social democratic core voters who then abstained or shifted to Continue reading →