Class Voting in West and East

In proposed contribution I focus on the examination of relation between different operationalization of concept of class voting in two different European contexts. There are theoretical assumptions that class play different role in Western and Eastern Europe, mainly because of different democratic tradition. According several authors there has been decline of class voting and/or change of nature of class in Western Europe, whereas in post-communist countries specific conditions, defined by voters’ lack of awareness about social position, interest and about parties, emerged. On base of individual data from European Values Study, it will be examined how class influence choice of party in Germany and Austria as cases of Western European countries and in Hungary, Czech Republic and Slovenia as cases of Eastern countries, whether it is possible to use same class schema on all these cases and whether is possible to assume same mechanism between class and voters’ choice.