Abstract
Conventional wisdom suggests that occupational class plays a limited role in explaining vote choice in Iceland. In this paper, we argue that the death of class in Icelandic politics may be premature and that it still plays a role in structuring political preferences and party choice. While the importance of the traditional class cleavage may have declined to the point of irrelevance, we suggest that there is a new type of class voting in Iceland, containing both a vertical and a horizontal component. Furthermore, we argue that the Great Recession played a critical role in increasing the strength of class voting around this new class schema, both because of the conflict around economic issues it generated, but also because of its facilitation of the formation and success of new parties. We test our main hypotheses using multinomial logistic regression on data from the Icelandic National Election Study from 1999 to 2016 and apply a modified measure of cleavage strength, which we refer to as “Full Kappa”. Our results suggest that class voting is alive and well in Iceland and that its strength has increased following the Great Recession.
Highlights
According to conventional wisdom, class voting is not an important aspect of Icelandic politics
The importance of the traditional class cleavage may have decreased in recent decades, we suggest that occupational class still plays a latent role in structuring political preferences and party choice
That the recent global financial crisis may have acted as a catalyst in realigning Icelandic politics around this new class schema
Summary
Class voting is not an important aspect of Icelandic politics. The importance of the traditional class cleavage may have decreased in recent decades, we suggest that occupational class still plays a latent role in structuring political preferences and party choice. We employ logistic and multinomial logistic regression to evaluate models of party choice, testing both the development of traditional class voting with data from 1983 to 2016, as well as whether a new class schema has gained relevance in Icelandic politics, with data from 1999 to 2016. We find support for the importance of class voting based around a new class schema, which structures party choice in Iceland. The paper updates and extends prior work on class voting in Iceland, evaluating its development before and after the Great Recession, as well as applying a more sophisticated measure of cleavage strength than in prior research. The measure, which we refer to as “Full Kappa”, improves upon the well-known Kappa-index and has the potential to be employed as a generic measure of cleavage strength
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
