Adam Przeworski’s Grim Outlook for Social Democracy
The master analyst of social democracy checks in on 40 years of prediction. He’s pessimistic about the future. But is he right?
When I think about big-name, mainstream political scientists who have done meaningful work on the intersections of socialism, social democracy, and capitalism, almost nobody comes to mind…except Adam Przeworski.1
He’s a must-read for everyone who goes through PhD comps in political science.
Przeworski has been notable for theorizing and analyzing social democracy—that compromise position straddling socialism and electoral politics. His writing never caught fire among the masses, in part because he often worked in a statistical, data-heavy mode that appealed to fellow political scientists but rarely resonates with the public. Still, he’s been more or less the grand analyst of social democracy since the latter part of the 20th century.
My narrow purpose for writing this is simply to share a working paper he’s just published called, “The Future of Social Democracy.” It’s fascinating and worthy of discussion. But to introduce what makes the paper interesting, it makes sense to first summarize a little bit about what I’ve learned about politics from his research over the years.
Development and Democracy
Przeworski disagreed with Seymour Martin Lipset’s classic argument that higher levels of economic development increased the odds of a democratic transition…but he agreed that high levels of economic development may have a stabilizing effect on established democracies.
The statistically-based claim gave reason to believe that modernization theory is nonsense, but also that being an advanced economy would be favorable terrain for a democratic status quo.
Modernization theory is of course nonsense. As for the other claim, the reason I think it still holds up is that, to put it crudely, a rich country has the capacity to redistribute resources in ways that bring about economic security and a richer civic life. Of course, just because you can has little bearing on whether you will.
Frankly, this kind of knowledge is what my discipline tends to produce the most, and it’s not super useful. For instance, the fact that the US is an advanced economy is not particularly helpful in determining America’s fraught political trajectory.
Strategy Dilemmas
Przeworski mapped out long ago the strategic dilemma facing anyone who seeks socialism: you must seek it through elections, through the working class directly, or through an overturning of capitalism…and these were pretty much mutually exclusive approaches.
The dilemma among these options was that if you wanted to make incremental progress toward socialism through elections, you had to reach out beyond the working class.
There’s obviously still a dilemma today between those who would blow up capitalism and those who would embrace electoral democracy. But the working-class tension with elections is not much of a dilemma anymore: today’s working class is mostly not the proletariat in the strict sense. Wage workers—regardless of economic sector—are the majority.
So elections and working-class politics are complementary these days, though for that convergence to really go anywhere there needs to be more of a movement to build a class-based political identity.
Class Compromise > Class War
The most important thing I took away from Przeworski’s work involved trying to distinguish between social democracy and socialism. The former, social democrats, tend to be more concerned with the distribution of economic gains than they are the balance of class forces (they care about both but prioritize the former in practice).
Social democrats are also willing to work within capitalism for progress toward socialistic ends.
But most importantly, social democrats do not necessarily invest the proletariat with any special role as transformative agents of history. To overly romanticize the proletariat today is to generalize from Marx a view that was historically specific to the 19th and early 20th century—manufacturing was so central to economic productivity that workers positioned at the site of manufacturing had powerful potential to lead class war. That is just not the case today.
Accordingly, as Przeworski points out, social democrats “rely on multi- and even supra-class support.” This is not to deny that owners of capital today wage a top-down, one-way class war on workers. But class war is not what social democrats seek—elections compel the social democrat to seek some version of class compromise or class unity.
Implicitly, by logical extension, the technocratic managerial class has the potential to literally make public policy a site of class compromise. The problem is only that in recent years that class seems to be beholden to oligarchic interests and opportunity-hoarding for what Branko Milanovic called the “new aristocracy” (the upper ten percent of society…themselves).2