Examining The Impact of Party Positions and Class Voting in 15 Western Democracies: A Pooled Analysis

Abstract

Studies that explain class voting have often focused on ‘bottom-up” social factors, but paid little attention to ‘top-down’ political factors. In this chapter, we argue that party positions on left-right ideology affect the strength of class voting. We test this thesis by estimating the impact of Left-Right party positions on the class-vote association through a Two-Step Hierarchical analysis of pooled data from Australia, the United States and 13 countries in Western-Europe (1960-2005) supplemented with data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. Although there is a general trend for class voting to decline over time, partially accounted for by the impact of education, we find that most variation in class voting does not take the form of a linear decline. The ideological positions of left-wing parties alone do not have any effect, but the polarization of parties along the left-right dimension is associated with substantially higher levels of class voting.