Title: The process of marketization of the European social democratic political discourse. The case study of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (1998-2013)
Abstract: European social democrats are facing challenging times. Their poor performance at a number of European national and regional elections, the European Parliament Elections of May 2014 and the associated rise of Eurosceptic, xenophobic and radical left factions revealed a crisis of their legitimacy. Among other, the emergence and consolidation of neoliberalism as the hegemonic political rationality in Western democracies is deemed to be burdening these parties’ performance. This political ideology and discourse, theoretically formulated in the 1940s and politically implemented since around the 1970s, has progressively become the hegemonic paradigm of today’s world dismantling with it some of the most basic social democratic core objectives.
Especially during the last two decades, the extension of neoliberalism to other spheres of human life (such the political sphere) is increasingly being addressed by academics of the social sciences. This process is known as marketization.
This thesis addresses the interaction of the traditional social democratic political discourse with neoliberalism, and inquires whether the political programme of these factions has been marketized. To this purpose, the case-study of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party has been selected in the research period between 1998 and 2013. Through its study, it aims at providing a description of the discourse resulting from the interaction of the neoliberal discourse with the PSOE’s discourse. The research program designed for the analysis of the corpus is mainly based on by Reiner Keller´s Discourse Analysis. An extensive corpus comprehended of PSOE’s electoral programmes, party congress resolutions and the magazine El Socialista´s articles were the focus of the empirical work. The participatory research has been also part of the research process.
The empirical work conducted in this study points to an overriding marketization of the PSOE’s political discourse, demonstrated through the evolution of its central rationality, which evolve from defending the intervention in the market to adaptation to it, and the partial abandonment of their core objectives of the after-war period: material security, equality, and the defence of workers’ rights. Drawing on the literature on hegemony, in this work the reasons deemed to lay behind the marketization of the European social democratic parties and the PSOE have been extensively outlined. Among others, the shift on the economic paradigm of the last three decades of the 20thcentury, the hegemony of the neoliberal narrative and language, the cementation of globalization and the conformation of a European Union with an orthodox economic programme are identified. In the case of the PSOE, its lack of strong intellectual base, such an influential research centre or think-tank, and the coincidence of the access of Spain to the EU with its time in office, further contributed to its marketization.
Publication Year: 2018
Publication Date: 2018-08-27
Language: en
Type: dissertation
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