How to Use social democracy in a Sentence

social democracy

noun
  • Macron believes that social democracy is no longer a threat to his rule.
    — Sylvain Cypel, The New York Review of Books, 17 Jan. 2020
  • To some extent, social democracy foundered on an outbreak of bad luck.
    — Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 4 Oct. 2022
  • This is a real threat to 250 years of law and social democracy.
    — Tracy Brown, Los Angeles Times, 27 July 2023
  • In its place, many of them claim to want a kind of conservative social democracy.
    — Michelle Orange, Harper's Magazine, 3 Nov. 2023
  • In its place, many of them claim to want a kind of conservative social democracy.
    — Sam Kriss, Harper's Magazine, 16 Oct. 2023
  • That is a project for which socialism, not social democracy, may be better suited.
    — Thomas Geoghegan, The New Republic, 31 Aug. 2022
  • But in its essential aspects, social democracy is the name of his desire.
    — Michael Kazin, The New Republic, 8 Sep. 2023
  • At the other end is social democracy, which is common in Europe.
    — Maggie Astor, New York Times, 12 June 2019
  • But there are people suffering and dying all over the world right now, in social democracies as well as dictatorships.
    — Christopher Beha, Harper's Magazine, 25 May 2020
  • It wasn’t intended as a pure libertarian project or a pure social democracy.
    — Joe Palaggi, Mercury News, 24 Dec. 2025
  • It wasn’t intended as a pure libertarian project or a pure social democracy.
    — Joe Palaggi, Twin Cities, 25 Dec. 2025
  • Is social democracy doomed to be a casualty of the tech revolution?
    — Annalee Newitz, Ars Technica, 4 Apr. 2018
  • Meanwhile, the vaunted history of social democracy is not really a story about youth.
    — James Chappel, The New Republic, 15 Nov. 2021
  • For a long time, the proximate cause of this transformation was the slow, agonizing death of social democracy.
    — Yascha Mounk, Slate Magazine, 24 Apr. 2017
  • In America, people think social democracy is some kind of communism.
    — E. Alex Jung, Vulture, 22 Oct. 2025
  • The city inspired one resident, Karl Polanyi, to a lifelong defense of social democracy.
    — Patrick Iber, The New Republic, 23 Apr. 2018
  • As a member of the Left Opposition, Hitchens believed in some form of social democracy all his life.
    — Matthew Continetti, National Review, 26 Dec. 2021
  • As such, the emerging progressive approach is far different from what prevails in Europe’s social democracies.
    — Matthew Zeitlin, Vox, 2 July 2019
  • So what was happening leading up through the ’70s is that New York City was becoming a social democracy.
    — Rebecca Jennings, Vox, 21 Nov. 2018
  • Is the only plausible way to avert a climate breakdown a full transformation of our society from corporate to social democracy?
    — David Grinspoon, Washington Post, 18 Oct. 2019
  • The catastrophe of war, Piketty argued in his 2013 work, gave social democracy its chance to triumph in the West.
    — Gary Gerstle, Washington Post, 17 June 2022
  • In this view, the presence of prominent Norwegians in the Epstein files unmask timeless truths about elites, social democracy and even goodness as such.
    — Ola Morris Innset, The Dial, 2 June 2026
  • And his clear implication is that social democracy can be revived by refocusing on populist economic policies, and winning back the working class.
    — Paul Krugman, New York Times, 8 Mar. 2020
  • Millenials and the generation below them seem more amenable both to government and to Western Europe-style social democracy than do their elders.
    — Benjamin Hart, Daily Intelligencer, 24 Feb. 2018
  • But at least Denmark recognizes that social democracy requires democracy, free speech, and the rule of law to keep it from turning into Venezuela on the Baltic.
    — Jonah Goldberg, National Review, 20 Dec. 2017
  • Adler, the son of the legendary founder of Austro-Hungarian social democracy, calmly waited to be arrested.
    — The Economist, 11 Jan. 2018
  • This does not necessarily mean that the United States will become a European-style social democracy.
    — Steven Delco, Hartford Courant, 29 June 2026
  • One answer is that although, for some outsiders, Scandinavia is a beacon of social democracy, the reality of life is darker and more complicated.
    — The Economist, 21 May 2020
  • Blaming Macron for the rise of the far right is convenient for many on the left, who do not wish to confront their own responsibility for the demise of France’s once-robust social democracy.
    — Arthur Goldhammer, The New Republic, 11 Apr. 2022
  • Pluralist social democracy is stuck in a finger trap of math and bigotry, where to pull on one end (support for diversity) seems to naturally strain the other (support for equality).
    — Derek Thompson, The Atlantic, 24 Oct. 2017

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'social democracy.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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