거시경제정책들의 정치학을 학습하자: Björn Bremer를 읽자!

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정승국

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거시경제정책들의 정치학을 학습하자: Björn Bremer를 읽자!

좌우파 스펙트럼에 배치된 우리나라 정당들은 자기 정체성이 무엇인지, 좌우파 정당의 정체성이 역사적으로 어떻게 변해왔는지, 자신의 정체성에 조응하는 정치경제학이 무엇인지, 자기 정체성에 어울리는 정책들이 무엇인지 잘 모른다. 정의당도, 민주당도, 국민의힘당도 잘 모른다.

예컨대 정의당은 좌파정당으로서 어떤 사회경제적 이슈를 제기할 것인지, 일자리 문제와 관련하여 어떤 정책을 정교하게 가다듬어야 할지를 사고하지 않고, 실현가능성이 없지만 '멋진 신세계'처럼 보이는 일자리보장제와 같은, 좌파 정책의 상품 진열대 위에 새롭게 전시된 정책을 기웃기웃거린다. 

중도정당 정도의 정체성을 갖고 있지만, 그 대신 좌파 정책과 우파 정책들 사이에 폭넓은 스펙트럼을 갖고 있는 민주당은 서구의 어느 좌파 정당조차도 채택한 적이 거의 없는, 포스트 케인주의에 입각한 소득주도성장 정책을 느닷없이 내세운다. 강령의 내부에 서로 어울리지 않은 요소들이 섞여 있을 때, 이것을 강령적 무질서(programmatic disorder)라고 부른다.

어제 갑자기 이준석 대표는 전국민 재난지원금에 합의했다. 이것에 대해 윤희숙 의원은 “나라의 모든 정책은 재정으로 구현되기 때문에 돈이 어떻게 쓰이는지를 보면 권력을 쥔 집단의 본질을 알 수 있습니다.” “‘양당대표간의 ‘전국민재난지원금 합의’는 이번 대선 전투의 가장 중요한 전선을 함몰시켰습니다. ~ 정권 교체를 바라는 국민의힘 지지자를 꼿꼿이 세우고, 합리적인 국민들을 설득할 수 있는 가장 날카로운 무기를 망가뜨린 것은 상대방이 아니라, 우리 내부 ‘철학의 붕괴’입니다”라고 썼다. 

재정문제와 관련하여 전통적인 우파 정당의 입장과 그 배후에 놓여 있는 정치경제학에 대해 정확하게 알고 있는 사람은 윤희숙 의원이다. 

재정의 정치학에 대해 좌우파 정당들이 역사적으로 어떤 입장을 가지고 있었는지, 2008년도 금융위기 이후 이른바 긴급 케인즈주의(emergency Keynesianism)에 입각한 재정확대정책 이후 각 정당들이 어떤 입장을 가지고 있는지를 가장 깊이 있게 연구한 연구자는 Björn Bremer이다. 

학술지 'Social Policy and Administration' 2021년 Feb 특집호 'Social Policy in the face of a global pandemic: Policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis'에 따르면 그의 분석은 COVID 19 상황에서 전개된 긴급 케인주의와 이후에 예상되는 상황에 대해서도 유효하게 적용된다. 

그는 2019년 EUI에서  “Austerity from the Left? Explaining the Fiscal Policies of Social Democratic Parties in Response to the Great Recession” 라는 이름의 박사학위논문을 받았다. 구글에 이름을 입력하면 그가 최근 발표한 여러 논문들을 구할 수 있다. 물론 우리의 상황과는 다소 차이가 있을 수 있다.

25 comments

현우진

포스트 코로나 시대에 맞는 새로운 경제학원론과 맨큐의경제학 교재를 누군가 만들어준다면 얼마나좋을까요...

 · Reply · 3 h

현우진

저도 요즘 정의당이 될것같지도 않은 전국민일자리보장제 얘기하고 반대하는사람은 적폐로모는거 보고 정말 답이없다고느꼈습니다

 · Reply · 3 h

정승국

현우진 맞습니다. 많이 아쉬운 정당입니다.

 · Reply · 2 h

Keun-deok Lee

강령적 무질서(programmatic disorder)라는 말에 동의하지만 전통적인 진보, 보수의 개념을 현재 우리의 정당들에 그대로 적용할 수 있을까요?

민주당이 진보정당이라는 것도, 국민의 힘이 보수정당이라는 것도 엄밀한 개념구분으로 보면 맞지 않다고 봅니다. 이것저것이 뒤섞여 있는 강령적 무질서가 그냥 인정해야 할 우리의 현실로 봐야 할 것 같다는 말씀입니다. 진정한 진보가 들어서기도 곤란하고 진정한 보수가 유지되기도 어려운 분단 한반도 남쪽의 특성이겠지요.

 · Reply · 3 h · Edited

정승국

이근덕 민주당과 국힘당의 이념적 차이는 있지요. 각 정당이 자신의 이념적 스펙트럼을 분명히 하여야 정당구조의 현대화가 촉진됩니다.

 · Reply · 3 h

Taein Jung

본인의 거시 이론으로 각 당의 정책을 난도질할 실력이 있으신 걸로…

 · Reply · 3 h

정승국

정태인 거시이론 실력이 없더라도 논평은 할 수 있지. 요리는 못 하더라도 음식품평은 할 수 있는 것처럼

 · Reply · 3 h · Edited

Taein Jung

정승국 타 정당 정책에 왈가왈부할 수준이 되다니 대단!

 · Reply · 2 h

손영득

정당들의 정치경제학 땡땡이가 초래한 강령적 무질서,..

아니,,강령이 없으니 노선도 혼선이 되는 것이것죠,..… See more

 · Reply · 3 h

정승국

손영득 정책으로 선거 경쟁해온 역사가 빈곤하니까요, 강령은 아무 것도 아닌 거죠.

 · Reply · 2 h

이영주

선생님, 함께 공부할 수 있는 기회를 주시면 감사하겠습니다.

 · Reply · 2 h

정승국

이영주 ^^

 · Reply · 2 h

강길모

대선때만 상품 소비적 강령을 (비선)참모 조직이 만들었다가 그 이후론 강령이 없어도 굴러가는 정당, 강령이 있으면 불편한 정당, 강령과 실제 입법이 달라도 문제가 없는 정당...결국 정당은 왜 존재하는가를 묻게 됩니다.

 · Reply · 2 h

정승국

강길모 그렇습니다. 정당구조의 현대화가 시급히 요구됩니다.

 · Reply · 2 h

==

The Missing Left?

Economic Crisis and the Programmatic Response of Social Democratic Parties in Europe

Björn Bremer  

European University Institute bjoern.bremer@eui.eu

December 2017

Forthcoming in Party Politics

Abstract

How have social democratic parties responded to the recent economic crisis? For many observers, the Great Recession and the prevalence of austerity in response to it have contributed to a crisis of social democracy in Europe. This paper examines the programmatic response of social democratic parties responded to this crisis in eleven Western European countries. It uses an original dataset that records the salience that parties attribute to different issues and the positions that they adopt with regards to these issues during electoral campaigns and compares the platforms of social democratic parties before and after 2008. For this purpose, the paper disentangles economic issues into three different categories and shows that this is necessary in order to understand party competition during the Great Recession: while social democratic parties shifted to the left with regards to issues relating to welfare and economic liberalism, they largely accepted the need for budgetary rigour and austerity policies.

Keywords: Party systems, elections, party change/adaptation, economic issues, Europe

1 Introduction

The Great Recession was the deepest economic crisis in advanced capitalist countries since the Great Depression.  In Europe this economic crisis also led to a crisis of social democratic parties, which struggled to respond to the economic malaise.  Prior to 2008, they had mostly shifted towards the centre and embraced Third Way policies. However, the Great Recession that begun in 2008 raised new doubts about the merits of this shift. The break-down of the international financial system exposed the vulnerability of the existing economic order and created high unemployment and inequality. Moreover, in response to the European sovereign debt crisis governments across the continent implemented austerity policies, undermining the European welfare state that social democratic parties had built in the post-war era (Korpi, 1983; Stephens, 1979). How have social democratic parties responded to this crisis?

To answer this question, the paper examines empirically whether and to what extent social democratic parties changed their economic positions during the Great Recession. Although it is too early to tell what the long-term political consequences of the crisis will be, the purpose of studying this response is to understand how economic crises influence party competition in the short- and medium-term (also see Clements et al., 2017). The starting point for this analysis are two conflicting findings in the literature. First, some authors have found that parties hardly change their positions over time (e.g. Budge, 1994; Budge et al., 2001). In particular, social democratic parties are portrayed as parties with a strong ideology and close ties to social movements that constrain them in responding to changes in the economy (Adams et al., 2009). Other authors, in contrast, argued that social democratic parties have radically changed their positions in the last few decades. In response to globalisation, they shifted to the right resulting in a “neoliberal convergence” of centre-left and centre-right parties (e.g. Mishra, 1999; Glyn, 2001).

In this paper, I test which of these expectations holds with evidence from the Great Recession. I use an original dataset based on media analysis in 11 countries that allows me to compare the salience that parties attribute to different issues and the positions that they adopt with regards to these issues during electoral campaigns before and after 2008. Analysing this data, I present evidence that social democratic parties shifted their positions towards the left during the crisis, which is contrary to common perceptions in the media (Münchau, 2015; The Economist, 2016) and emerging research (English et al., 2016; Dalton, 2016). However, their positions diverged with respect to different issue categories. On the one hand, social democratic parties defended the welfare state and opposed economic liberalism after the 2008 financial crisis, which partly reverted their own Third Way. On the other hand, many parties also supported the reduction of government deficits and taxes during the crisis – that is, they joined the chorus of austerity that became the dominant tune during the Euro crisis. Hence, social democratic parties adopted positions with regards to the three different issue categories (welfare, economic liberalism, and budgetary rigour), which do not neatly align on a single left-right line of conflict. This suggests that party competition during the Great Recession was complex and cannot be represented on a single dimension (Otjes, 2016).

To make these arguments, the article proceeds in six steps. First, I briefly review the existing literature. Second, I set out my expectations about the response of social democratic parties to the Great Recession and formulate my hypotheses. Afterwards, I introduce my dataset and explain the methods that I use to analyse party competition. In section 5 and 6, I proceed to present my empirical results. Combining descriptive analysis with regression analysis, I first examine the salience that social democratic parties attributed to economic issues during the crisis. Then, I analyse the position that these parties adopted with regard to economic issues. Finally, section 7 concludes.

2 Party Positions, Issue Salience, and the Economy

There is a large literature that studies the platforms on which political parties compete. Influenced by the median-voter theorem of Downs (1957), many scholars view parties as vote-seeking (e.g. Huber and Powell, 1994; McDonald and Budge, 2005). They argue that there is a close link between the positions that parties take and the preferences of the electorate. Consequently, party elites systematically respond to variations in the distribution of voters’ preferences, which is a process that (Stimson et al., 1995) called “dynamic representation.” . However, given that large shifts in the distribution of voters’ preferences are rare, the programmes of parties remain relatively stable over time. As a result, many scholars shifted their attention towards studying salience (Budge et al., 2001; McDonald and Budge, 2005; Bélanger and Meguid, 2008). They focused on “issue emphasis” (Budge and Farlie, 1983) because ‘[v]arying emphases on issues are by and large the only way that parties express their policy differences’ (Budge et al., 2001, p.82). Based on the notion of “issue ownership” (Petrocik, 1996), parties are attributed different levels of competence in different policy areas and they have an interest to selectively emphasise those areas in which they outshine their competitors. However, the voters’ prioritisation of different issues can change between elections (Petrocik, 1996; Petrocik et al., 2003; Bélanger and Meguid, 2008). Thus, parties are expected to change the salience that they attribute to different issues, even if they hardly change their positions over time.

The conclusion that party positions are relatively stable is shared by two other strands of the literature. On the one hand, the classical work by Lipset and Rokkan (1967) argues that parties are rooted in cleavages. These cleavages are relatively stable over time and given that parties have distinct cleavage locations, they limit the positional manoeuvrability of existing parties in response to external shocks (Hooghe and Marks, 2018). On the other hand, other authors viewing parties as policy-seeking also consider the positions of parties relatively stable (Strøm, 1990; Müler and Strøm, 1999; Dalton and McAllister, 2015). From this perspective, the positions of parties reflect the beliefs of their elites, which, in turn, are shaped by the parties’ core ideologies. Ideologies provide actors with a general frame of reference, which allow them to understand and interpret events Assuming that these ideologies are sticky, parties are not expected to radically change their positions, either. In particular, left-wing parties are resistant to change their position for two reasons (Adams et al., 2009). First, left-wing parties are historically more ideological than other parties. They were born from the labour movement in the 19th century and remained committed to engineering social change even after they had abandoned their revolutionary ambitions (Przeworski and Sprague, 1986). Second, social democratic parties have close ties to trade unions and social movements that restrict their ideological flexibility even if these ties have weakened in the last few decades (Kitschelt, 1994; Piazza, 2001).

However, the problem with many of these studies is that they examine party competition in a vacuum and ignore the role of contextual factors. Only recently authors have begun to explicitly study the importance of economic conditions for party competition (Ward et al., 2015, 2011; Haupt, 2010; Adams et al., 2009). Much of this research studies the effect of globalisation on political parties and it is closely related to research in political economy, which has argued that globalisation constrains state intervention in the economy (Berger, 2000; Strange, 1996). Paradoxically, this literature has also singled out social democratic parties to make their case (Scharpf, 1987; Garrett and Lange, 1991; Ward et al., 2011). Assuming that globalisation makes it increasingly difficult for social democratic parties to correct undesirable market outcomes, they abandoned their core ideologies and increasingly embraced orthodox policies. Thus, globalisation diminished the policy differences between the left and paved the way for a “neoliberal convergence” of mainstream parties (Mishra, 1999; Ross, 2000; Callaghan, 2000; Glyn, 2001; Pierson, 2001). Although some authors dispute this “neoliberal convergence” hypothesis (Allan and Scruggs, 2004; Burgoon, 2001; Boix, 1998), they often agree that globalisation forces parties to adapt their political programmes, albeit in a complex and variegated way. Political parties are seen as strategic actors that use different political programmes to respond to domestic and international economic changes. In principle, this approach is not necessarily contradictory to research, which finds that party positions are relatively stable: while many authors emphasising stability study the basic dimensional position of parties, those predicting change focus on individual issues. Still, the literature provides two different expectations about how social democratic parties respond to economic changes: some authors argue that party positions are stable and that parties only selectively emphasize and de-emphasize certain issues, whereas others argue that parties actually adapt their programmes in response to the domestic and international economic context. Which of these conclusions holds up when we consider the response of social democratic parties to the Great Recession?

The Programmatic Response of Social Democratic Parties to the Great Recession: Some Expectations

The Great Recession has been a structural break for the development of the advanced economies. It was triggered by the mortgage crisis in the United States and became a full blown financial crisis in September 2008, when the investment bank Lehman Brothers collapsed. This bankruptcy sent shock waves through the international financial system and created a deep economic recession across almost all advanced capitalist countries. Europe was hit especially hard because in 2010 the ‘American’ financial crisis turned into a ‘European’ sovereign debt crisis. The political repercussions of this crisis are still uncertain, but it is already becoming clear that the Great Recession was a critical juncture that has changed long-term trends of political conflict in Europe (Hernández and Kriesi, 2016).

One important trend prior to the Great Recession was the increasing importance of non-economic or cultural issues for party competition (Franklin et al., 1992; Kitschelt, 1994; Kriesi et al., 2008; Hooghe and Marks, 2009). Yet, the crisis increased economic grievances throughout Europe and presented all political actors with an acute set of economic problems. Given that materialist concerns become more important for the electorate during times of economic hardship (e.g. Margalit, 2013; Singer, 2011; Traber et al., 2017), I expect that all political parties attempted to capture the public mood and increased the salience of economic issues after 2008 (hypothesis 1a). Still, it is likely that the crisis did not effect all parties equally because parties ‘own’ different political issues (e.g. Petrocik, 1996; Green and Hobolt, 2008; Wagner and Meyer, 2014). Although the economy is usually addressed by all parties, social democratic parties are historically associated with issues relating to social solidarity. Therefore, I also expect that social democratic parties increased the salience of economic issues more than other parties, which are less concerned with social justice (e.g. Conservative parties) or more associated with non-economic issues (e.g. the Greens or the radical populist right), as expressed in hypothesis 1b.

Salience Hypothesis I (H1a): Social democratic parties increased the salience of economic issues in response to the crisis.

Salience Hypothesis II (H1b): Social democratic parties increased the salience of economic issues more than other parties, which are less associated with issues relating to social solidarity.

In response to the economic turmoil, I also expect that social democratic parties changed their positions on economic issues. Many studies showing that the positions of parties are relatively stable, focused their analysis on long-term trends during periods of relative economic stability. In contrast, a growing literature in political economy has emphasized the importance of crises as critical junctures (Capoccia and Kelemen, 2007; Collier and Collier, 1991). Politics may appear stable during “normal times” due to path-dependency (Pierson, 2000), but crises shake the foundations of existing social systems. The resulting uncertainty allows policy entrepreneurs to engineer institutional change (Capoccia, 2015) and often leads to institutional, political, and policy change with significant legacies (Gourevitch, 1986). They create the perfect pre-conditions for paradigm change, as outlined by Hall (1993), because the uncertainty opens up windows of opportunity, during which ideas can serve as explanations of what went wrong, and how to fix it (Blyth, 2002; Matthijs, 2011). For social democratic parties, the Great Recession should have been such a critical event because it provided them with a golden opportunity to renew their traditional socio-economic programmes, as expressed in hypothesis 2a. Importantly, for other parties this opportunity did not exist to the same extent. While some of them already had more leftist positions prior to the Great Recession (e.g. far left parties), other parties (e.g. conservative parties) could not shift their positions leftwards due to the pro-market ideologies that they adhere to. Hence, I expect that the effect of the crisis should have been particularly large for social democratic parties (hypothesis 2b).

Position Hypothesis I (H2a): Social democratic parties responded to the crisis by moving to the left on economic issues.

Position Hypothesis II (H2b): Social democratic parties responded to the crisis by moving to the left on economic issues more than other parties.

However, the impact of the crisis was not uniform across all economic issues. Importantly, in the wake of the crisis one has to distinguish between three issue categories: (1) issues that relate to the welfare state and redistribution; (2) issues that relate to economic liberalism; and (3) issues that relate to the budget of the government (see table 1). This distinction is necessary because in order to capture the complex political impact of the crisis. First, the crisis was widely narrated as a crisis that resulted from excessive liberalisation of the financial system (e.g. Blanchard et al., 2010; Bean, 2010). This presented centre-left parties with a window of opportunity to oppose economic liberalism and distance themselves from the causes of the Great Recession. Similarly, low-income households, which social democratic parties claim to represent, were particularly at risk during the Great Recession due to the increase in unemployment and economic uncertainty. Thus, the Great Recession also provided social democratic parties with an opportunity to renew their support for the welfare state. Yet, with regards to macroeconomic policies, social democratic parties had less lee-way to change their policies. Most governments stimulated the economy immediately after the financial crash in 2008 (Hall, 2013; Pontusson and Raess, 2012), but leading policy makers soon began to demand austerity when the financial crisis turned into a sovereign debt crisis. As Matthijs and McNamara (2015) critically point out, conventional wisdom held that this crisis was caused by excessive government debt and ‘irresponsible’ behaviour by the debtor countries. Social democratic parties in these countries were, thus, forced to accept austerity measures in return for bail-out packages from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (e.g.

PASOK in Greece, PS in Portugal, and PSOE in Spain).

Table 1: List of Economic Issue Categories (adopted from Kriesi et al. 2008)

Categories Description of Left-Wing Positions

Welfare Support for the welfare state and redistribution through taxes and benefits

Economic Liberalism Opposition to competition, deregulation, and privatization

Budgetary Rigour Opposition to a rigid budgetary policy and the reduction of taxes (without an explicit redistributive character)

Parties in creditor countries or outside the Eurozone also largely accepted this shift to austerity. For example, the German SPD already supported the introduction of a constitutional debt brake in 2009 and promised to reduce government debt as one of the key pillars of its economic programme in 2013 (Social Democratic Party of Germany, 2013). Similarly, the Labour party in the UK accepted the need for fiscal consolidation. The party opposed the spending cuts by the Conservative government, but it also adopted a fiscal commitment prior to the 2015 election promising to ‘balance the books and deliver a surplus on the current budget and falling national debt in the next Parliament’ (Balls, 2014). Consequently, we need to disentangle issues that relate to the government’s budget from other economic issues. In particular, I expect that left-wing parties did not shift to the left with regards to budgetary issues during the crisis but that they addressed these issues more often in order to signal economic competence (Kraft, 2017) and to appeal to fiscally conservative voters, who favour balanced budgets. Facing attacks from other political parties, they attempted to present themselves as economically competent and responsible in this way. These expectations are summarised in hypotheses 3a and 3b.

Programmatic Differentiation Hypothesis I (H3a): Social democratic parties increased the salience of issues relating to budgetary rigour in response to the crisis.

Programmatic Differentiation Hypothesis II (H3b): Social democratic parties did not move to the left on issues relating to budgetary rigour in response to the crisis.

Still, there are reasons to believe that the expected shifts by social democratic parties, as expressed in hypotheses 1 to 3, did not happen in all countries equally. In particular, the depth and length of the crisis should have influenced the response of left-wing parties to the Great Recession. In countries that escaped the crisis relatively unscathed, leftwing parties had less reason to increase the salience of economic issues and change their position with regards to issues like welfare and economic liberalism. Importantly, while they might have also shifted to the left in the immediate aftermath of financial crisis, I expect that they moderated their positions again as the impact of the recession waned in their country. Therefore, in countries that were hit especially hard by the economic crisis, we can expect that parties altered their positions on the economy more fundamentally, which is formulated in hypothesis 4.

Economic Conditionality Hypothesis (H4): The depth and length of the economic crisis influenced the effect of the crisis: in countries where the economic crisis was severe, social democratic parties changed salience and positions more than in countries where it was less severe.

Social Democratic Parties and the Crisis: Changes in Issue Positions

The economic crisis did not only change the salience of economic issues, but it also influenced the positions that parties took on these issues. Figure 3 compares the left-right position before and after 2008 for the centre-left and centre-right parties. It illustrates that every social democratic party shifted to the left after 2008, except the Labour Party in Ireland and the PvDA in the Netherlands. On average, these parties shifted their aggregate left-right position by 0.15 points. Furthermore, in most countries the moderate right as well as other parties (not shown in figure 3) moved in the opposite direction Figure 2: Salience of Different Economic Issues for Social Democratic Parties by Country

 

as social democratic parties. Hence, there is evidence that both hypotheses 2a and 2b are true: the crisis led to a divergence between mainstream parties and, thereby, partly reversed the neoliberal convergence among mainstream parties that had occurred prior to the crisis.

In order to test whether these differences are statistically significant, I again use regression analysis. The results in model 1 of table 3 show that the moderate left- and right-wing parties indeed had programmes that were very similar prior to the crisis because the coefficient for moderate left-wing parties is not statistically significant when the Figure 3: Average Party Positions on Economic Issues by Party Family by Country

 

Left−Right Position

moderate right is used as the reference category. The differences between mainstream parties on economic issues had all but eroded and only far left parties had programmes that were significantly different from the mainstream in economic terms. However, the Great Recession changed this picture. As indicated by the interaction term, social democratic parties shifted leftwards and competed on a programme that was different from the programme of the moderate right. This is true even when controlling for other factors that could potentially influence a party’s position on the left-right dimension of political conflict, including economic conditions and potential constraints from government responsibility. Thus, there is evidence that the Great Recession ended the neoliberal convergence, i.e. parties distinguished themselves again by different economic positions, as partisan theory expects (e.g. Hibbs, 1977).

Conclusion

In conclusion, the Great Recession systematically changed the platform on which the European moderate left competed in elections. In terms of salience, social democratic parties paid more attention towards economic issues again, but this was mirrored by a general increase of salience for all parties. Centre-left parties moved in tandem with centre-right and liberal parties and emphasised economic issues more during the Great Recession. In this way, the crisis halted a previous trend that saw mainstream parties appeal to cultural issues prior to the crisis. However, in terms of positions, left-wing parties set themselves apart from other parties in response to the Great Recession. Despite the popular perception that the left was missing during the crisis and failed to defend its core ideology during the crisis, my findings paint a more nuanced picture. In almost all countries studied here, social democratic parties defended the welfare state and became more sceptical of economic liberalism. Thereby, the centre-left retracted large parts of its Third Way policies and reversed the neoliberal convergence that scholars had observed prior to the Great Recession. Yet, these parties did not shift to the left in response to the crisis with regard to all categories. Importantly, social democratic parties accepted the need for fiscal consolidation and budgetary rigour, which created some tensions within their platforms. These tensions are signs of a deep identity crisis that social democratic parties faced in the wake of the economic crisis and that many of them have failed to resolve until this day.

However, at this point there are already at least three implications from the evidence presented in this paper that are worth noting. First, the Great Recession initiated a critical juncture for party competition in Europe. While my evidence shows that parties changed the salience that they attribute to economic issues in tandem, they did change their programmes in different directions in response to the economic shock. Although we cannot be completely certain that parties will not shift back to their pre-crisis position, it confirms that parties are strategic actors that respond to changes in their economic context. Second, the evidence also shows that parties do not always change their positions in the same direction on all issues categories. Consequently, we need to be careful when studying party programmes in aggregate terms: although it is certainly useful to rank parties based on their left-right positions, scholars also need to appreciate that parties sometimes bundle policy packages together that do not fall on the same end of the leftright dimension. Hence, we should pay more attention towards studying the positions of parties on individual issues and analyse how the positions of parties with respect to different issues relate to each other. Finally, social democratic parties adopted a rather inconsistent programme during the Great Recession. In particular, the budgetary policies that social democratic parties have put forward can neither be easily squared with their support for the welfare state nor with their own core ideology. Therefore, we need further research to understand why social democratic parties accepted austerity in response to the crisis. This research would not only shed light on the distributive conflicts associated with fiscal policies, but it might also help us to make sense of the current crisis of social democratic parties in Europe.