Warum scheiterte der Dritte Weg der Sozialdemokratie?

This study explores the internal, external and policy-related causes of the failure of the Third Way of social democracy in Germany and the UK. For this purpose, it embeds the modernisation processes of the SPD und Labour Party in the theory of party change and analyses them from a comparative perspective. The main argument of the analyses is that the programmatic, political and strategic rejection of the Third Way stems, in both cases, from complex interaction between lack of acceptance within the party, conceptual policy failures and a decrease in electoral competitiveness as a result of economic policy and welfare reform.