Who Represents Whom? How Parties’ Group Appeals Influence Class Voting

Across the Western democracies, the impact of social class on electoral choice has been declining. Recent studies have emphasized party electoral strategy as the main explanation of this. However, existing work has focused only on parties’ changing policy appeals. In contrast, this article argues that parties’ changing group appeals is equally, if not more, important in shaping the class basis of electoral choice. I claim that parties appeal to social groups to sustain or alter their image as social group representatives, and that this in turn affects how relevant class position is to vote choice. Focusing on Britain, I first present new data from a line-by-line content analysis of all election manifestos made by the Labour Party and the Conservative Party from 1964 to 2015. It shows that the two parties have converged in their class-based appeals but also that class groups as such have been crowded out as targets in parties’ group appeals. Second, I link the party-level data with survey data from the same 50-year-period and present two key findings: Parties’ group appeals affect public perception of class representation and they condition the impact of class on voting. Results suggest that class-party alignments are much more sensitive to party strategy than is usually believed. More generally, they also imply that dominant theories in comparative politics miss key dynamics when explaining how parties lead electoral change.