Ni « rouge » ni « pauvre type » ? Le parti socialiste suisse à la recherche de son électorat (1947-1983)

Abstract

leur focalisation sur un électeur-type ouvrier, masculin et suisse. For the last few decades, the Socialist voter base has become a bugaboo in public discourse and in European social democracies more specifically. The idea that political parties have “abandoned” their working-class voters to the extreme right-wing of the political spectrum is frequently evoked. The question of the representativeness of social democratic parties is not a new one, however, and has long been discussed within a transnational framework, with partisan actors comparing national situations to each other and/or drawing inspiration from their “sister parties”. In reality, the very image of the homogeneity of historic social democratic electorates should be challenged, given the often trans-class movements of these parties, the nuanced transformations of working-class and popular environments since the 19 th century, and the influence of immigration, which has constantly questionned the national framework of action for social democratic parties. This article will look at the Swiss Socialist Party to analyze how partisan cadres and activists think of and address voters. Although the postwar period saw the Party’s integration into power-sharing agreements on the basis of allegedly stable electoral quotas, behind the curtain the Party was constantly rethinking its voter base and its relationship to the working class. During the Cold War, the Party first sought to shake off the “red” label and to reach the “middle class.” The arrival of women as voters in 1971, parallel to a wave of labor migration in the 1960s and 1970s, led social democrats to move past their focus on a male, Swiss, and working-class voter.