AbstractsPolitical Science

This thesis is concerned with the question why social democratic parties in Western Europe have shifted their socio-economic policies towards the right of the political spectrum in the 1990s. In particular, labour market reforms that substantially conflict with social democratic ideology and conduce to the gradual erosion of the welfare state are under scrutiny. Building on the theoretical innovations of discursive institutionalism, it contributes to the academic effort of resolving the research gap on the motivation of social democratic parties legitimising this shift by focussing on the communicative discourse of social democratic parties governing in the Netherlands (PvdA) and Germany (SPD). Moreover, communicative discourse is posed as the independent variable explaining the strong difference in the degree of societal protest to the respective national reforms – within a timeframe of similar socio-economic challenges and with (ideologically) similar reforms. The thesis concludes, firstly, that the motivation of the PvdA and the SPD are generally alike in terms of their emphasis on the necessity to reform/modernise the labour market given internal and external challenges to the welfare state. Secondly, subtle but significant differences in the consistency, cognitive soundness and considerateness of the conveyance of the respective discourses explains why public protest in Germany was stronger than in the Netherlands.