Abstract
How can we explain the long-term decline in the class-based voting cleavage observed in high-income democracies since the 1960s? The causes of this decline are far from being fully understood. We hypothesize that the decline in this cleavage between the working class and other classes is connected to the shrinkage of the working class, increases in economic prosperity, and a reduction in levels of inequality. To test these hypotheses, we use a newly-assembled dataset including sixteen advanced democracies with a long temporal coverage (1964–2019) and a class voting index based on the difference between the proportion of a particular social class in a party’s electorate and the proportion of this social class in the electorate as a whole. Models using country fixed effects confirm a decline in the class-based voting cleavage across Western democracies. Controlling for several political variables, the size of the working class constitutes the best predictor of declines in class voting in affluent democracies.
Published Version
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