Cultural Divide and Distributive Conflict: Political Attitudes and Vote Choice Among Working Class Voters

Political conflict in established democracies is increasingly structured along two main dimensions: a cultural one that divides between authoritarian and cultural liberals, and a distributive one that divides between those in favour and against state intervention and redistribution. Numerous accounts have suggested that the political loyalties of the working class are changing because of the tensions fostered by this bi-dimensional political space. Recent analyses have found an increasing support for the radical right among workers as a result of such strains. This papers focuses exclusively on working class voters to understand how political attitudes along the two dimensions interact with the various aspects that structure the labour market positions and experiences of the multiple segments of the working class to drive vote choice. We distinguish the following vote choices: radical left, centre-left, centre-right, radical right and other parties. We use a novel dataset collected purposely to comprehensively capture the labour market positions and conditions of voters in France, Germany, Greece and Spain in 2019.