Class voting and Left–Right party positions: A comparative study of 15 Western democracies, 1960–2005

Studies that explain the class voting have often focused on “bottom-up” social factors, but paid little attention to ‘top-down’ political factors. We argue that party positions on left–right ideology have an effect on the strength of class voting. This argument is tested by estimating the impact of the Left–Right party positions on the class-vote association through a Two-Step Hierarchical analysis of integrated data from 15 countries in Western-Europe, the United States and Australia (1960–2005) supplemented with data from the Comparative Manifesto Project. Although there is a general trend for class voting to decline over time, partially accounted for by the impact of education, we find that most variation in class voting does not take the form of a linear decline. The ideological positions of left-wing parties alone do not have any effect, but the polarization of parties along the left–right dimension is associated with substantially higher levels of class voting.

► Left–Right party polarization is associated with higher levels of class voting.
► Left–Right positions of left-wing parties alone do not influence class voting.
► Class voting declines over time, but most of the variation in class voting is non-linear.
► Left–Right party polarization explains a substantial proportion of the nonlinear variation in class voting.