Labour and left-wing parties’ programmatic orientations: salience, valence and the impact of the Great Recession

The steady weakening of the relationship between parties and civil society, in particular trade unions, has been the subject of considerable research. The same cannot be said, however, of the programmatic salience assigned by political parties to labour issues. This paper aims to explore how different party families relate to labour through a quantitative and qualitative approach. First, data from the MARPOR/Comparative Manifestos Project is used to compare the relative salience of labour in distinct party families, thus allowing us to analyse trends over time and across countries. Second, we focus on Southern Europe, before and after the crisis, to conduct a qualitative analysis of left-of-centre party positions toward labour. The findings suggest that labour issues are less salient in contemporary party platforms and that the mainstream left depoliticised this dimension of competition over the last decades. The historical links between parties and trade unions, the ideological legacies of left-of-centre parties and electoral pressures are the main factors that explain variations of party positions toward labour.