Centre-left Strategies and Electoral Performance: The Case of the Spanish Socialist Party, 1972-2023

The vote share of social democratic parties across the EU collapsed to an all-time low throughout the 2010s. This electoral crisis is attributed to international economic and technological transformations, changes in electoral participation at the national level, and the cartelization of centre-left parties themselves. While there is no consensus on which of these dimensions is more significant, most accounts present a top-down account of events whereby external forces—such as macroeconomic transformations and/or shifting voter preferences—force the centre-left into a vulnerable position. This study argues instead that the crisis of social democracy is best understood through a bottom-up perspective, with the formulation and execution of party strategies within centre-left parties as the key dependent variable to understand their electoral performance. Party strategies are a process of mediation that succeed or fail depending on whether they secure internal cohesion, manage competition within the national party system, and provide compensation for the losers of transformations in the international economy. The following pages test this hypothesis through a critical case study of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) between 1972 and 2023. The PSOE’s history of internal factionalism, generational renewal, orthodox economic policymaking, and economic crisis management does not make it an ideal-type candidate for electoral stability—measured as a function of the party’s capacity to retain both electoral primacy and a core of low-income and low-education voters. In recent years, however, the party has regained a strong foothold among Spanish voters. Relying on process tracing and engaging with a host of primary sources, including party manifestos and interviews with elites that formulated the PSOE’s strategies in three different time periods (1972-1996, 2000-2011, 2014-2023) this study argues that while social democrats face increasingly challenging political competition, they retain the agency to enact key decisions leading to electoral primacy or decline.