In recent decades, social democracy has repeatedly been declared dead. In response to the collapse of the growth regime in the seventies, many analysts concluded that the social democratic model had become either economically or electorally unfeasible. According to liberal supply-side economists, the ever-increasing regulation of the economy was strangling entrepreneurial activity. In order for prosperity to be regained, a decisive turn to liberal economic policies was required.

Sociologists and political scientists with more sympathies for the social democratic project instead predicted the inevitable decline of social democracy due to the erosion of its electoral base. Because social democracy appealed to the common interests of the traditional working class, it seemed that it could only thrive politically in a society in which blue-collar workers not only formed the majority but also identified themselves as belonging to one class.

Since the sixties, these alleged preconditions for social democratic success seemed to be waning rapidly. Industrial jobs started disappearing so rapidly that by the midnineties, at best only 20 percent to 30 percent of employment relations could be characterized as blue collar. Moreover, the blue-collar class itself seemed to increasingly abandon its traditional social democratic values. To the extent that the expanding welfare states of Western Europe remedied the disadvantaged position of labor, the conditions of work became less important as a focal point for identity formation.