Social Class and Values in Voting for Right-Wing and Mainstream Conservative Parties in Europe

Electoral behaviour in Europe has undergone profound transformations in recent years. The rise of populism and the changing role of mainstream parties have highlighted the limitations of traditional ideological dimensions such as left-right axis or the socio-structural characteristics in explaining political behaviour. This underscores the paradox of why working-class individuals support conservative and right-wing populist parties, even when such alignment appears to contradict their material interests. To answer this question this work goes beyond this traditional approach and mixes social class with human values. Using data from European Social Survey (2024) and the Schwarts human-value schema, we test whether the combination of social class joint with the material or cultural human-value dimensions impacts on voting for right-wing and mainstream conservative parties in contemporary Europe. Preliminary findings show that values shape conservative voting in class-specific ways. In the cultural dimension, tradition fosters RWP support among skilled and unskilled workers, while conformity in skilled workers. Power drive RWP among skilled workers and small owners. In contrast, tradition supports MCP voting among the upper class. In the material dimension, equality increases RWP support in the upper class, while free enterprise strengthens their MCP support. These results suggest that cultural values offer a more consistent explanation of class-based conservative voting than material ones. The study contributes a novel framework for understanding conservative alignment in contemporary Europe by integrating class and values. Overall, the results suggest that the stability of human values and their influence on class voting behaviour serves as a significant predictor of electoral behaviour in a landscape in which cultural political narratives have detracted from material political proposals, shifting class interests to the cultural dimension. Thus, social class combined with human values can be used to analyse voting behaviour in both dimensions.