Social democracy

Social democracy is a political ideology that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a capitalist economy, and a policy regime involving welfare state provisions, collective bargaining arrangements, regulation of the economy in the general interest, redistribution of income and wealth, and a commitment to representative democracy. Social democracy aims to create the conditions for capitalism to lead to greater egalitarian, democratic and solidaristic outcomes. ""Social democracy"" is often used in this manner to refer to the social policies prominent in Western and Northern Europe - particularly in reference to the Nordic countries - during the latter half of the 20th century. Alternatively, social democracy is defined as a political ideology that advocates a peaceful, evolutionary transition of society from capitalism to socialism using established political processes.Contemporary social democracy emerged in the post-war era. In this period, social democrats embraced the idea of reforming capitalism and rejected the goal of replacing capitalism with socialism. Social democrats embraced a mixed economy based on the predominance of private property, with only a small number of utilities and essential public services under public ownership. In this period, social democracy became associated with Keynesian economics, state interventionism, and the welfare state and abandoned the goal of replacing the capitalist system of private property, market-based allocation and wage labor with a qualitatively different socialist economic system.Modern social democracy is defined by its commitment to constitutional and representative democracy under the rule of law; support for a mixed economy that opposes the excesses of capitalism including inequality, poverty, and the oppression of underprivileged groups; and measures to extend democratic decision-making beyond politics into the economic sphere to grant employees and other economic stakeholders co-determination. Social democrats aim to achieve these goals through the provision of universally-accessible public services including education, health care, workers' compensation, child care and care for the elderly. The social democratic movement has strong connections with trade unions and the labour movement, and is supportive of collective bargaining rights for workers.During late 19th and early 20th centuries social democracy aimed to replace private ownership with social ownership of the means of production, influenced by both Marxism and the supporters of Ferdinand Lassalle until 1868–1869 when Marxism became the official theoretical basis of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany. In the early 20th century, the German Social Democratic politician Eduard Bernstein rejected the revolutionary and materialist foundations of orthodox Marxism, believing that socialism should be grounded in ethical and moral arguments and that it could be achieved through gradual legislative reform. Influenced by Bernstein, following the split between reformists and revolutionary socialists in the Second International, social democratic parties rejected revolutionary politics in favor of parliamentary reform while remaining committed to socialization. In this period, social democracy became associated with reformist socialism. Under the influence of figures like Carlo Rosselli, social democrats began disassociating themselves from Marxism altogether and embraced liberal socialism, appealing to morality instead of any consistent systematic, scientific or materialist worldview. This included appeals to communitarian, corporatist, and sometimes nationalist sentiments; rejecting the economic and technological determinism generally characteristic of orthodox Marxism and economic liberalism. By the post-World War II period, most social democrats in Europe had abandoned their ideological connection to Marxism and shifted their emphasis toward social policy reform in place of transition from capitalism to socialism. The Third Way is a major faction in social democratic parties that developed in the 1990s which aims to fuse right-wing economics with social democratic social policies, though some analysts have characterized it as an effectively neoliberal movement.