How Class Affects Voting: Mass-Party Linkages in 16 West European Countries

Despite the oft-cited decline of class voting, class is still one the major determinants of political behaviour in Western Europe, as demonstrated recently with the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump as president in the US. The effect of class on party preference can be separated into an indirect and a direct effect. While the former is often interpreted such that class works through political ideology, the latter suggests that processes of social influence affect voting directly. This could, for instance, be because members of different classes pick up cues from politically engaged minorities in their class and vote according to these cues without necessarily sharing the ideology of the party. It could also be due to historical ties between a social group and a party, transmitted through parental socialization. Recent studies of class voting have demonstrated that the behaviour of political parties affect the level of class voting. In this study, I intend to test the theoretical proposition that the behaviour of political parties affect the mechanisms (i.e. direct vs indirect) through which class works on party preference. Specifically, I argue that the more extreme views a party holds on issues of relevance to the social group (here: class) and the more a party emphasizes its positions on those issues (such as income redistribution), the larger the indirect effect through economic left-right ideology will be. On the contrary, direct effects due to e.g. historical ties are more likely to be found for parties that either do not hold extreme views or do not emphasise those views. I combine data on 90 parties from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey with mass survey data from 16 West European countries to test these propositions. The paper will bring the study of social structure and political preference further, which certainly seems pertinent in these days. Furthermore, the findings have democratic implications, as they may indicate under what conditions class voting is a sound way of expressing your political ideology – namely, when parties hold clear positions on economic issues – and under what conditions it is not.