We, in return, support a different methodological approach: the concept of the “third way” should be considered as a modified and adapted to modern challenges version of liberal socialism. New Labour's Ideology: A Reply to Michael Freeden. Dolowitz, the concept of the “third way” is not an eclectic combination of the ideas of other ideological traditions (social democracy and neoliberalism) it is based on the principles of social liberalism Buckler, S., Dolowitz, D.
Thus, according to the approach of British researchers S. However, today there is no unanimity among scholars about the ideological origins of the concept of the “third way”. ) project of the ideological renovation of European social democratic parties (and, as a consequence, the formation of a “new social democracy”) was seen in the model of the “third way”, based on the maximum convergence of ideological positions of socialism and liberalism. The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy.
In the late 20th - early 21st century this new, the most theoretically developed (based on the concept of British scientist A. Meyer rightly emphasized, all social democratic parties faced the need to develop political projects that would correspond to the new social situation and become “an actualization of a historical impulse of social democracy, and an opening of a realistic perspective for conquering the majority in their countries.” Майер, T. Therefore, on this background, socialist and social democratic parties in Western Europe (even though the overwhelming majority of them criticized the project and disassociated from it) faced another serious challenge in the search for a new ideological identity and effective electoral strategies. In our opinion, those failures were mainly stipulated by the collapse of the Soviet ideological project, which (the collapse) led to a significant discredit of socialist ideas and the global crisis of the entire leftist movement. In particular, SDPG lost elections in 1987, 1990, 1994, and BLP - in 19. However, an ideological renovation did not lead to the desired result - social democracy was still in crisis. Thus, in an effort to face those challenges social democratic parties looked for a new ideological identity and models of organizational reforming: by using the strategy of a “catch-all party”, those political forces rejected traditional leftist ideological positions, recognized the benefits of a market economy and supplemented their programs with ideological theses of post-material essence, striving, thus, to completely leave behind the losing electoral image of class parties and establish themselves as parties of “all people”.
The brightest examples are the British Labour Party (BLP) and the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SDPG).
Here we mean that the combined effect of these factors caused a deep political and ideological crisis of the socialist and social democratic parties: they lost elections and for a long time lost power in their countries. The determining factors of that shift were: firstly, the global economic crisis of the 1970s (it questioned the effectiveness of the Keynesian model of socio-economic policy) secondly, a significant transformation in the social structure of the leading industrial countries (decrease of the share and political authority of the working class in favor of new social groups with the priority of post-material values consequently, “old” left parties lost their traditional electoral base). The principal trend of ideological and institutional evolution of social democratic parties of the last quarter of the twentieth century was their shift to the right, closer to the center of the left-right party ideological spectrum. Hennadii Shypunov, PhD in Political Science Liberal socialism and social liberalism: the principles of correlation