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  • Reviving Social Democracy: The Near Death and Surprising Rise of the Federal NDP ed. by David Laycock and Lynda Erickson
  • Dennis Pilon
David Laycock and Lynda Erickson, eds., Reviving Social Democracy: The Near Death and Surprising Rise of the Federal NDP (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press 2015)

Reviving Social Democracy is an unusual and welcome addition to the study of Canada’s New Democratic Party. It doesn’t go where you expect it to and is curiously and refreshingly neutral on some of the key questions facing the party. This is surprising because books on the left tend to be one of a few types: self-serving insider accounts where reforming party elites triumph over backward party members and activists, moralistic condemnations from (typically) non-party social activists complaining the party is not radical or anti-capitalist enough, or rather bloodless accounts from academics who do not appear to understand why anyone on the left would not simply join the Liberal Party. By comparison, Reviving Social Democracy has a relatively open mind about where the ndp should go and the ongoing importance of its unique ideological position in Canada’s party system.

The point of the book is to answer a perennial question about left politics – does an electoral party on the left succeed by giving up its leftism or sticking to it? This is explored by examining the revival of ndp fortunes since the federal party’s near demise electorally in 1993. The book’s answers are rather unclear and sometimes contradictory. But on the journey we discover a number of interesting and surprising things about the party, its behaviour, its supporters, and the larger context it has been operating within.

The book is divided into four parts. Part One comprises four chapters, all written by the volume’s editors, that set out the broad history of the party (1961–2003), developments under Layton’s leadership (2003–11), a review of the party’s long efforts to break into Québec, and an assessment of the ways in which the party has struggled to modernize its appeal and internal structures as part of its electoral recovery since 1993. The historical chapters provide effective background for the rest of the book but the key contribution here is the chapter on modernization. Too often used as a short-hand for “selling out” or “facing reality,” Laycock and Erickson draw from comparative work on social democracy to argue that processes of “modernization” can be more selective and focused in their impact, affecting a party’s political discourse, core values, policy objectives, and/or policy instruments to varying degrees. Depending on which things are changed and which are kept the same, social democratic parties can be distinguished between those that remain traditional (ends and means stay the same) and those that become modernized (ends stay the same but means change) or liberalized (both ends and means change). This three-fold distinction is similar to Gøsta Esping-Andersen’s breakdown of different kinds of welfare states and serves a similar purpose, to grasp the substantive differences that exist between them. After reviewing changes to the ndp’s leadership style, institutions (e.g. party finance), communications strategies, and organization, Laycock and Erickson argue that the party should be considered a modernizing rather than liberalized social democracy [End Page 293] party (87) because, despite changes in all four areas, the party has retained much of its traditional policy profile. (88)

Part Two focuses on the ideological evolution of the party, attempting to grapple with the key question for many observers: i.e. to what extent has the ndp become more centrist over time? Here too the book tries to advance the discussion by expanding our understanding of what ideology is and how it works. Drawing on Michael Freeden’s breakdown of party ideology as involving core, adjacent, and perimeter concepts, Laycock examines a host of ndp documents and public statements to assess to what extent the party’s value commitments really have changed. Specifically, he explores how the party has taken up what he characterizes as their core ideas like equality, democracy, an active state, and solidarity over time...

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