The End of Class Politics?

Abstract

Abstract For many years, there has been an intense debate over the importance of social class as a basis of political partisanship and ideological divisions in advanced industrial societies. The arguments of postmodernists and disillusioned socialists have been combined with those of numerous empirical researchers on both sides of the Atlantic—and in both sociology and political science—who have claimed that class inequality has lost its political importance. Yet at the same time, the class politics proselytizers—whether Marxist or otherwise—have remained unpersuaded. This book presents a state‐of‐the‐art analysis of the changing nature of class voting and the salience of class politics in advanced industrial societies. It combines broad ranging cross‐national comparison with detailed country studies and empirical tests of key theoretical and methodological explanations of changing levels of class voting. The final section includes commentaries from distinguished scholars from the fields of social stratification, political science, and political sociology, followed by a general discussion. The strengths of the book are the following: (1)a combination of breadth and depth, which uses both comparative analysis of up to 16 countries and detailed analyses of several of the more critical cases; (2) methodological sophistication: a particularly high quality is attained in the measurement of class and voting, and in the statistical analysis of their relations through time; (3) an interchange of skills and knowledge from political science, social stratification research, and the sociology of politics; and (4) an international collection of established and in some cases extremely eminent contributors. On the basis of the evidence presented, it is argued that in many cases class divisions in voting have not declined. Much of current orthodoxy among both political scientists and sociologists with regard to the declining class basis of politics is brought into question by the ’The End of Class Politics?’. This should enable it to serve as a major reference point for future work and discussion on the social bases of political divisions. The readership includes both sociologists, primarily in the areas of political sociology and stratification and political scientists. As an authoritative research statement it would appeal to practitioners, graduate classes, and advanced undergraduate courses. It would also be useful for advanced research methods teaching, as it would provide a more effective demonstration of the relation between methods and substance than do texts that teach methods per se. The inclusion of three chapters looking at the US, both as a case study and in cross‐national context, make it relevant to an American as well as European audience.