The education and income voting divides in Canada and their consequences for redistributive politics

Abstract

Profound changes in the nature of class cleavages in advanced capitalist economies have been documented in recent years. Some have posited that the increasingly educated nature of left electorates has weakened impulses for redistribution. In contrast to most advanced democracies, class voting has largely been neglected in Canada, as it has traditionally been viewed as being comparatively weak in the face of strong linguistic, regional, and religious identities. Using the entire series of the Canadian Election Study (1965–2019) we examine the education and income political divides in Canada. We find strong support for a divergence between the effect that income and education have on party voting, as people with high incomes continue to vote for the right, while people with higher levels of education have shifted significantly to the left. However, we also find a strengthening income cleavage, whereby lower-income individuals are increasingly supporting the social democratic New Democratic Party, with redistribution a key driver. The findings reveal that Canada, despite a strengthening class cleavage, largely fits the mould of a multi-elite party system. However, it does so in a distinct fashion from the party systems previously examined in the cleavage literature.