What is "social democracy"

n. 1 A moderate political philosophy or ideology that aims to achieve socialistic goals within capitalist society such as by means of a strong welfare state and regulation of private industry. 2 The peaceful and gradual transition from capitalism to socialism by democratic means. 3 A society based on either of the above.

n. the belief in a gradual transition from capitalism to socialism by democratic means

Social Democracy was a Mexican political party formed in June 1999 and disbanded after the 2000 federal elections.

In the 2 July 2000 presidential elections its candidate, Gilberto Rincón Gallardo, won 1.6% of the popular vote. In the senatorial elections of the same date the party won 1.8% but no seats in the Senate of Mexico. Since it did not secure 2.0% percent of the national vote it lost its conditional recognition by the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE).

In 2003 its most visible leaders could not reorganize its former members under the Party of the Rose (Partido de la Rosa). After failing to regain the federal recognition, most of them migrated to different parties of the center-left such as México Posible, Fuerza Ciudadana, Convergencia and the Social Democratic and Peasant Alternative Party.

Among its most prominents members were Gilberto Rincón Gallardo, Ricardo Raphael and Patricia Mercado.

Social Democracy is a political party in Serbia. The party leader is Nenad Vukasović. It took part in Serbian parliamentary election, 2007 as an independent list but won no seats with only 0.12 percent of vote or 4,903 votes. It is one of four parties that won less than 10,000 votes even though they had to submit exactly the same number of signatures in order to be able to run in the elections.

Social democracy is a political, social and economic ideology that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a capitalist economy, and a policy regime involving collective bargaining arrangements, a commitment to representative democracy, measures for income redistribution, regulation of the economy in the general interest and welfare state provisions. Social democracy thus aims to create the conditions for capitalism to lead to greater democratic, egalitarian and solidaristic outcomes; and is often associated with the set of socioeconomic policies that became prominent in Northern and Western Europe—particularly the Nordic model in the Nordic countries—during the latter half of the 20th century.

Social democracy originated as a political ideology that advocated an evolutionary and peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism using established political processes in contrast to the revolutionary approach to transition associated with orthodox Marxism. In the early post-war era in Western Europe, social democratic parties rejected the Stalinist political and economic model then current in the Soviet Union, committing themselves either to an alternate path to socialism or to a compromise between capitalism and socialism. In this period, social democrats embraced a mixed economy based on the predominance of private property, with only a minority of essential utilities and public services under public ownership. As a result, social democracy became associated with Keynesian economics, state interventionism, and the welfare state, while abandoning the prior goal of replacing the capitalist system (factor markets, private property and wage labor) with a qualitatively different socialist economic system.

Modern social democracy is characterized by a commitment to policies aimed at curbing inequality, oppression of underprivileged groups, and poverty; including support for universally accessible public services like care for the elderly, child care, education, health care, and workers' compensation. The social democratic movement also has strong connections with the labour movement and trade unions, and is supportive of collective bargaining rights for workers as well as measures to extend democratic decision-making beyond politics into the economic sphere in the form of co-determination for employees and other economic stakeholders. The Third Way, which ostensibly aims to fuse right-wing economics with social democratic welfare policies, is a major ideology that developed in the 1990s and is sometimes associated with social democratic parties, but some analysts have instead characterized the Third Way as an effectively neoliberal movement.