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Economic restructuring, labor market insecurity, and the erosion of traditional working-class occupations have profoundly reshaped political behavior across Europe. Much of the existing literature links these transformations to declining political participation, increasing support for far-right parties, or authoritarian attitudes among working-class voters. Yet empirical patterns across countries and social groups remain strikingly uneven. This panel brings together papers that examine why similar structural pressures lead to different political outcomes, and how institutional, organizational, and welfare-state contexts mediate these effects. The contributions combine qualitative and quantitative approaches—including interviews, archival analysis, survey data, and text analysis—to investigate working-class political alignment across diverse European settings. Empirically, the papers cover cases such as Belgium, Poland, the United Kingdom, and cross-national analyses using comparative survey data. Rather than treating economic insecurity as a sufficient explanation, the panel spotlights the contextual role of welfare institutions, occupational sectors, and long-standing political cultures in shaping political attitudes, participation, and partisan alignment. Taken together, the panel builds on debates about class politics, political inequality, and far-right mobilization, and advances them by demonstrating that political responses to economic change are contingent rather than uniform. By focusing on both cases of political realignment and cases of persistence or resistance, the panel reveals how working-class political behavior is structured by institutional and organizational legacies in contemporary Europe.
| Title | Details |
|---|---|
| Is There a Causal Relationship Between Occupations and Ideology? The Case of the British Third Sector | View Paper Details |
| Pillarization and Persistence: Explaining Working-Class Resistance to the Far Right in Wallonia | View Paper Details |
| The Democratic Welfare State: How Does the Welfare State Moderate Political Participation Gaps Between Labor Market Insiders and Outsiders? | View Paper Details |
| Selection, Socialisation, and Political Change: A Longitudinal Analysis of Political Authoritarianism in Poland, 1998–2023 | View Paper Details |