Over the last three decades many Western European social democratic parties have been challenged by populist radical right parties. The growth and success of parties on the right flank of the party system represents a triple challenge to the social democrats: they increase the salience of issues traditionally ‘owned’ by the right; they appeal to working‐class voters who traditionally support the centre left; and they may facilitate the formation of centre‐right governments. This article explores social democratic parties' strategic options in the face of this challenge, and tests the widespread assumption that the centre‐left parties respond by taking a tougher stance on issues related to immigration and integration. Comparative analysis of developments in Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and Norway reveals significant variation in the substance, scope and pace of the strategic responses of their social democratic parties. And it suggests that those responses are influenced not only by the far right but also by the reactions of mainstream centre‐right parties and by parties on their left (and liberal) flank. Internal disunity, potential or actual, is also an important factor.

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A recent 'state of the art' review of the political science literature on migration notes that myriad studies 'have provided evidence that a range of actors influence policy outcomes. They include organised interest groups, courts, ethnic groups, trade unions, law and order bureaucracies, police and security agencies, local actors and street-level bureaucrats and private actors ' (Lahav and Guiraudon, 2006: 207).Missing from the list (although, to be fair, they later make a brief appearance in a table as 'conduits of public opinion') are organisations that one might have expected to have had some say in the matter. Their absence, however, is not unusual even if it is curious: as a contribution to one recent edited collection puts it, 'political parties have received relatively short shrift among students of the politics of migration'; they 'enter the story as minor characters with undefined roles' (Triadafilopoulos and Zaslove, 2006: 171, 176) This is almost certainly because, with a handful of exceptions

Recent years have seen the institutionalization of minority governance in Sweden and New Zealand. Large, historic social democratic labour parties enjoy comparative security of tenure thanks to smaller, newer parties with whom they have signed long-term, detailed support agreements covering both policy and process. This trend toward ‘contract parliamentarism’ owes much to party-system dynamics, but also to the accretion of experience, to cultural norms and to institutional constraints – all of which, along with electoral contingency, explain why the trend has gone slightly further in one polity than in the other. While the trend seems to favour the left in general, its implications for the support or ‘servant’ parties, and – more normatively – for democracy itself, may be less favourable.

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