Henry Farrell, Network member and associate professor of political science at George Washington University, posted a new blog at Crooked Timber on challenges to left-wing parties in a society that increasingly sees improvements for the global poor and global rich, with no such improvements for the global working class.
In the European context, Farrell argues:
“European voters, mainstream European parties and European leaders have increasingly learned how to live without effective participatory democracy. And now it’s biting the social democratic left. The withering of links between leftwing parties and their electoral base, combined with the movement of real decision making to the European level, leaves these parties in the cold. They neither know how to connect to voters any more, nor have any real program for change on those occasions (thanks to exhaustion with their opponents) they actually win office. It’s little wonder that so many of their voters are defecting.”
