Social democracy is officially a reformist democratic socialist political ideology. Social democracy supports legal entitlements in social rights for citizens. These are made up of universal access to public services such as: education, health care, workers' compensation, and other services such as child care and care for the elderly. Social democracy is connected with the trade union labour movement and supports collective bargaining rights for workers. Contemporary social democracy advocates freedom from discrimination based on differences of: ability/disability, age, class, ethnicity, gender, language, race, religion, and sexual orientation. Most social democratic parties are affiliated with the Socialist International.

Social democracy in its current form was originally developed by revisionist Marxist Eduard Bernstein who criticized orthodox Marxism's emphasis on revolution and class conflict, claiming that socialism could be achieved through evolutionary means through representative democracy and through cooperation between people regardless of class. Bernstein claimed that a mixed economy of public, cooperative and private enterprise would be necessary for a long period of time before private enterprises would evolve of their own accord into cooperative enterprise. Bernstein supported state ownership only for certain parts of the economy that could be best managed by the state, he rejected a mass scale of state ownership as being too burdensome to be manageable.