Social Indicators

Abstract

While the term 'social democratic' was used by Marxist socialist political groupings in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, following the split between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions post-1914, the term came to be used as a descriptor of less radical factions on the left. In the 1960s, the term was used to describe the consensus between 'right'- and 'left'- wing groups in liberal democracies (e.g. the Conservative and Labour Parties in Britain) constructed around acceptance of the need for a welfare state, with a mixed economy, progressive taxation, and Keynesian economic strategy. At the end of the 1950s, Daniel Bell was able to argue that the social democratic consensus was so dominant that ideological debate (in the West at least) was over.