Social democracy

Social democracy is a broad, centre-left social, economic, and political ideology. Some academics view social democracy as distinct from socialism, whilst other academics purport that social democracy lies within the wider socialist movement. Social democracy supports political and economic democracy and a gradualist, reformist, and democratic approach toward achieving social equality. In modern practice, social democracy has taken the form of a predominantly capitalist, yet robust welfare state, with policies promoting social justice, market regulation, and a more equitable distribution of income. Social democracy maintains a commitment to representative and participatory democracy. Common aims include curbing inequality, eliminating the oppression of underprivileged groups, eradicating poverty, and upholding universally accessible public services such as child care, education, elderly care, health care, and workers' compensation. Economically, it supports income redistribution and regulating the economy in the public interest. Social democracy has a long-standing connection with trade unions and the broader labour movement. It is supportive of measures to foster greater democratic decision-making in the economic sphere, including collective bargaining and co-determination rights for workers. The history of social democracy stretches back to the 19th-century labour movement. Originally a catch-all term for socialists of varying tendencies, after the Russian Revolution, it came to refer to reformist socialists who were strategically opposed to revolution as well as to the authoritarianism of the Soviet model, though the eventual abolition of capitalism was still upheld as an important end goal. However, by the 1990s social democrats had embraced mixed economies with a predominance of private property and promoted the regulation of capitalism over its replacement with a qualitatively different socialist economic system. Since then, social democracy has been associated with Keynesian economics, the Nordic model, and welfare states. The Third Way was developed in the 1990s as an offshoot of social democracy which aims to fuse...