Between social democracy and communism: an institutional and socioeconomic perspective

The purpose of this paper is to explore which socioeconomic and institutional factors are responsible for different societies’ ideological choices, with reference to Marxist socialism. Which factors led to the rise of the popularity of socialism? And which factors made a socialist variant relatively more successful in one society but not the other, with social democracy and communism being the focus of the study?

Conducting a global theoretical and empirical study on the period between the late 1890s and 1945. The theoretical part discusses various perspectives presented in the literature, accounting for the works of major sociologists (e.g.: M. Mann, Lipset) and political theorists (e.g.: Marx, Engels, Lenin). The empirical part uses a number of OLS multivariate panel regressions using voting to various socialist movements as dependent variables, and socioeconomic and institutional factors as independent variables.

Some of the findings of the conducted empirical study are that: democracy, industrialization, high population growth rates, low linguistic or religious homogeneity, more years of schooling and less years since independence or creation increase the social democrat (SD) vote. The communist vote was affected positively by more urbanization; higher population growth; less years of schooling; more years since independence; recent experience of war; and the presence of insignificant religious minorities. Inequality seemed also to have been a strong significant factor for raising the popularity of various socialist parties, especially when countries were long-established or created. Countries which had a fresh experience with war devastation or which were highly urbanized while having higher levels of inequality witnessed an increasing vote share for the communists. More votes went to SD; however, when inequality existed in highly industrialized countries. High GDP growth, matched with higher inequalities, did not seem to have encouraged voting for various socialist parties, and even affected the communist vote negatively.

There were data limitations on the available proxies.

This study suggests welfarism, public spending on education, social inclusion and democratization as remedies for radicalism, regardless of the ideological origins of such radicalism.

Its novelty is attributed to the deep analytical dimension for the issue done here, combining theory, an empirical study made possible by the newly available rich historical data.