The extent to which party choices are structured by social divisions and the origins of these divisions, as well as change in their strength over time, is important for understanding the politics of contemporary democracies. The Michigan Model stresses that class position helps account for perceptions and attitudes which in turn shape political choices (see Hutchings and Jefferson, this volume). It can explain, for example, why some people endorse income redistribution while others do not. Moreover, changes in the sizes of classes, the evolution of the class structure, can help explain the menu of party choices available to voters, as well as the consequences this has for their choices and whether they vote at all. Similarly, religious denomination and religiosity continue to form prominent cleavages in several societies; religion is after all one of the “triumvirate” of social bases of cleavages (class, religion, and language) identified in Lijphart’s seminal article (1979) and is identified as the oldest prominent cleavage in Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) classic analysis. In the same way that class position can shape perceptions and attitudes, so does religion, though in areas such as abortion, euthanasia, and gay marriage rather than distribution of economic resources. Changes in levels of religiosity can likewise be expected to influence the nature of party competition and the political choices presented to voters. Most research into the social bases of political divisions has been of a descriptive nature, focusing on the strength of cleavages across time and space. This chapter addresses that approach, but also covers a newer body of work that aims to address explanations for variations in the strength of these cleavages.
In the rest of the chapter, we first consider what we mean by cleavages. We then examine class politics and class voting, considering first what we mean by class. Finally, we examine research into religious denomination, religiosity, and voting.
The related but separate concepts of social and political cleavages are central to understanding how class and religion can inform political choice. Social cleavages refer to distinctions in social and political values held between different social groups such as social classes as well as ethnic and religious groups that may or may not be relevant as the basis of political competition and hence political choice. Political cleavages, on the other hand, refer to divisions in political and social values that are directly relevant to political competition and thus political choice. Differences in values are usually conceptualized along two dimensions: the economic and social. The economic dimension is usually understood to provide a contrast between pro-market and antimarket views (for example, one being for lower taxation and the other for greater redistribution), whereas the social dimension is understood as a contrast between liberal and authoritarian/ conservative values.
Although the study of the social and political cleavages is often combined in empirical work, the study of social cleavages primarily relates to purely social stratification and divisions and, in the case of religion, to conflicts in social values in societies and their impact on political behavior, whereas the study of political cleavages tends to focus on political institutions and their ability to shape social values (Bartolini and Mair 1990: 215). The first is very much a “bottom-up” approach that focuses on long-term social change such as the secularization of societies as they modernize or the changes in class identities driven by the rising dominance of service industries over traditional sectors such as manufacturing and agriculture. In contrast, the second emphasizes the “top-down” influence of political institutions and elites on shaping and activating a latent division in the population. These two perspectives, although combined in empirical studies, represent distinct theoretical traditions that have shaped debate on the social bases of politics. We first examine how they are manifest in the study of class and politics.
Characterizations of class position have included numerous occupational classifications, employment status (e.g., owner versus employee), status rankings, income level, educational level, various combinations of education and income and occupation, and subjective class identification. In American voting studies, it has not been unusual to treat current income as a measure of class position, typically trichotomized into upper/middle/lower income classes (see, for example, Bartels 2008; Leighley and Nagler 1992, 2007). Outside of the USA, however, researchers have typically focused on occupational class position. A simple manual versus nonmanual occupational class distinction was used extensively in the mid–late twentieth century, but has since tended to give way to more complex classifications. Most contemporary researchers studying voting behavior have tended to adopt a validated and widely-used measure of occupational class position originally developed by sociologists, particularly Goldthorpe, Llewellyn, and Payne (1987; Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992). The main classes identified in this measure are the higher and lower professional and managerial classes (classes I and II), the “routine nonmanual class” (typically lower-grade clerical “white-collar workers,” class III), the “petty bourgeoisie” (small employers and self-employed, class IV), and the “working class” (foremen and technicians, skilled, semi-, and unskilled manual workers, classes V, VI, and VII). These classes differ significantly in terms of wages, job security, flexible working hours, pension provision, sickness benefits, autonomy, future career prospects, and life-time expected income, and have been rigorously validated (e.g., Evans 1992; Evans and Mills 1998; Goldthorpe and McKnight 2006). As a result, they now form the basis of both the UK Census measure of class position (Rose and Pevalin 2003) and the European Socio-Economic Classification (Rose and Harrison 2010).
Classic texts in political sociology saw elections as the expression of “the democratic class struggle” (Anderson and Davidson 1943) between just two classes, the working and the middle, and their representatives, the parties of the left and right. Early surveys observed that, in general, working class voters were more likely to vote for left-wing political parties than were those in the middle class, though with substantial cross-national differences. Scandinavia and Britain displayed the highest levels of class voting and the United States and Canada the lowest, though the cross-national comparability of such studies was limited by a lack of standardized measures of social class (see, for example, Lipset 1981 [1960]; Rose 1974). The first study to undertake a more directly comparable assessment of class voting was Alford’s (1963) analysis of Australia, Britain, Canada, and the US between 1936 and 1962 in which he introduced the commonly used “Alford index.” The Alford index is the difference between the percentage of manual workers that voted for left-wing parties on the one hand and the percentage of nonmanual workers that voted for these parties on the other. This became the standard instrument in many studies in ensuing decades, most of which found that class voting was in decline (Lipset 1981 [1960]: 505; Inglehart 1990: 260; Sainsbury 1987; Listhaug 1993; Lane and Ersson 1994: 94).
This position was further endorsed by two extensive cross-national studies of electoral change and cleavage politics: Nieuwbeerta (1995) and Franklin, Mackie, and Valen (1992). As a result, by the 1990s many commentators agreed that class voting in modern industrial societies had all but disappeared (see, for example, Clark and Lipset 1991: 408). Class was thought to have lost its importance as a determinant of life-chances and political interests because either the working class had become richer, white-collar workers had been “proletarianized,” or social mobility between classes had increased. At the same time, post-industrial cleavages such as gender, race, ethnicity, public versus private sector, and various identity groups had emerged and replaced class-based conflict, while new post-material values had supposedly led to the “new left” drawing its support from the middle classes, thus weakening the class basis of left–right divisions. Moreover, rising levels of education had ostensibly produced voters who were calculating and “issue oriented” rather than being driven by collective identities such as class (Franklin, Mackie, and Valen 1992).
Although these studies have been influential, during the 1980s a body of research emerged that questioned the robustness of their findings, arguing that reliance on the manual/nonmanual distinction obscured important variations in the composition of these highly aggregated classes (Heath, Jowell, and Curtice 1985). For example, if skilled manual workers are more right-wing than unskilled workers and the number of skilled workers increases, the Alford estimate of difference between manual and nonmanual workers will decline even if the relative political positions of skilled, unskilled, and nonmanual workers remain the same. Accordingly, studies using the Goldthorpe class schema and more extensive categories of political choice found little evidence of declining class voting in Britain (see, for example, Heath, Jowell, and Curtice 1985; Heath et al. 1991; Evans, Heath, and Payne 1991), but only “trendless fluctuations.” Comparative research found that the linear decline in left versus non-left voting proposed, most notably, by Nieuwbeerta (1995) was not universal. In Norway (Ringdal and Hines 1999), the decline in traditional class voting is confined to a short period in the 1960s. The decline in Denmark disappears (Hobolt 2013). There is also evidence of rises in levels of class voting. In Britain, levels of class voting increased in the 1940s and 1950s before falling again in the 1960s (Weakliem and Heath 1999). Also, in some of the new post-communist democracies, the pressures of marketization and increasing economic inequalities strengthened class voting (Mateju, Rehakova, and Evans 1999; Evans 2006; Evans and Whitefield 2006).
The discussion below of the “bottom-up” and “top-down” approaches will show, however, that the cleavage decline and “trendless fluctuation” stories can be viewed as different aspects of a greater process of “unfreezing” of the traditional links between social groups and parties. This “unfreezing” process occurs through several interacting mechanisms, such as the phasing out of traditional party loyalties through generational replacement of voters (see van der Brug and Franklin in this volume) as well as changes in the social structure and political elite strategies, which will be discussed further.
In recent years, the debate about the decline of class voting has arguably lost its intensity: there is evidence of decline (Jansen, Evans, and De Graaf 2013), but the cross-national picture shows considerable variation with little or no evidence of a fall in class voting in some societies (see Brooks, Nieuwbeerta, and Manza 2006, and relevant case studies in Evans and De Graaf 2013). Interest instead has turned to explanations for variations in the strength of the class–vote relationship across time and societies.
Most early scholars assumed a sociological, relatively deterministic “bottom-up” explanation in which the transition to a post-industrial society was accompanied by a diffusing of the class structure resulting in weaker patterns of voting between classes. However, an opposing view to this socially deterministic argument emphasizes the role of the political elite in the structuring of class political divisions. This approach claims that “variations in class voting are argued to derive from differences in the redistributive policy choices offered to voters” (Evans 2000: 411). Often referred to as a “top-down” approach, variations in the strength of social divisions in political preferences are argued to derive from the choices offered to voters by politicians and parties. Studies focus primarily on the extent to which parties take differing positions along dimensions of ideologies or values and thus shape voters’ political choice sets. To the degree that voters are responsive to the programs offered by parties, rather than simply voting on the basis of habit, or long-term party attachment, differentiation between parties on relevant ideological dimensions increases the strength of the association between class position and party choice. Conversely, where parties do not offer different choices, class divisions are weaker. In short, voter responses to party polarization and the extent to which this drives changes in the class bases of party preference depend upon the choices voters are offered (the supply side), as well as the presence of differences in ideological and value preferences within the electorate (the demand side).
The thesis is not new (see, for example, Converse 1958; Kelley, McAllister, and Mughan 1985; Przeworski and Sprague 1986; Kitschelt 1994) but only recently has there been extensive empirical analysis of the impact of the choices offered by parties on social divisions in voting. Moreover, it differs from some earlier top-down arguments in that it moves away from the assumption that class-based values and preferences are themselves shaped by the way parties frame choices and talk about politics (see, for example, Sartori 1969). Such “preference shaping” implies that parties influence the attitudes of their supporters, so that class differences in ideology and values derive from the positions taken by the parties associated with different social classes. However, recent studies (see, for example, Baldassarri and Gelman 2008; Adams, Green, and Milazzo 2012) indicate that sorting takes place rather than “indoctrination” – thus on issues where voters differ from their party they will, over time, shift away from that party. In the British case, for example, the distancing of the political left from the working class occurs because the Labour Party failed to carry the working class with it as it moved to more liberal positions on economic and social issues, resulting in increased defection to parties such as UKIP (Ford and Goodwin 2014; Evans and Mellon 2016). Class divisions in preferences are robust even when the parties shift their positions (Evans and Tilley 2012b). A similar resistance to preference shaping explains the emergence of a working class basis to radical right rather than leftwing parties as the latter have shifted to court the votes of the new middle classes (e.g., McGann and Kitschelt 2005; Spies 2013; Rennwald and Evans 2014).
Evidence for the impact of changes in parties’ left–right ideological positions on levels of class voting was initially provided in Britain by Evans, Heath, and Payne (1999), who show a close relationship over a 20-year period between left–right polarization in parties’ manifesto positions and the extent of class voting. A further study extended this analysis to more than 40 years and estimated that without convergence in party programs no convergence in class voting would have been observed (Evans and Tilley 2012a). Studies by Oskarson (2005) and Elff (2009) suggest that this pattern is found elsewhere in Europe. Most recently, the “political choice” model of class voting has been consolidated by a broad-ranging comparative combination of case studies and cross-nationally pooled over-time analyses of the relationship between party manifesto positions and the strength of class voting (Evans and De Graaf 2013). A 15-nation analysis combining up to 50 years of evidence finds a correlation of 0.42 between left–right polarization in party manifesto programs and the strength of class voting, even when controlling for other aspects of social change (Jansen, Evans, and De Graaf 2013). This growing body of evidence points to the importance of political choices for patterns of class voting, in addition to any social changes that might influence them.
An interest in how the choices offered by parties influence voting has also led to a focus on the political consequences of the shape of the class structure: specifically, the declining size of the working class. Early voting research focused on the working class, especially in Britain (see, for example, Butler and Stokes 1969), where studies explored in detail the phenomenon of “working class Conservatives” (McKenzie and Silver 1968; Nordlinger 1967), as it was assumed that it was only the failure of such voters to fully express their “true” class interests electorally that prevented a left-wing, working class electoral hegemony. Since then, however, the reduction in the size of the working class, as industrial societies have become post-industrial, has led to it no longer constituting the largest class, nor being the primary source of left-party support. This process has been argued to lead to a vicious circle in which parties stop representing working class people, who in turn stop turning out to vote, further reducing the incentive for parties to appeal to them (Evans and Tilley 2017). Whereas the social attitudes and policy preferences of the working class were at one time considered mainstream by virtue of the working class constituting a significant proportion of the population, they have become increasingly marginal as the working class has become a minority. This marginalization has been exacerbated by changes in the recruitment patterns of the parties: even parties of the left are now dominated by professional politicians with middle class backgrounds, an elite university education, and the values associated with such milieu (Carnes 2012; Heath 2015; Evans and Tilley 2017). Increasingly, these politicians are socially alien to working class voters. Arguably an important growing class cleavage therefore is between voting or not voting: political parties aim their campaigns at a new middle class constituency who are more likely to turn out at the polls (Evans and Tilley 2017), while ignoring working class voters and further dis-incentivizing their participation. This process was identified in the US some time ago by Hill and Leighley (1996), who linked state-level left policy programs to class differences in turnout. Once the habit of voting is lost it is difficult to reinstate: Leighley and Nagler (2014) find no increase in poor/working class participation since the late twentieth century, despite the ideological polarization of the main US parties, thus shifting the center of political gravity toward a new, middle class electoral hegemony.
There are similarities in the debates about class and those about our other significant social cleavage, religion. Until quite recently the dominant consensus has been that religion is declining in importance across modern societies and thus of little relevance to understanding political competition. The modernization of societies has been said to lead to the gradual secularization of societies. In what is very much a “bottom-up” approach, the secularization thesis argues that the rising levels of urbanization and education have increased the dominance of scientific rationality (Swatos and Christiano 1999); economic development, on the other hand, is said to alleviate the economic vulnerabilities that underpin the attractiveness of religion as a source of social support and security to marginalized socio-economic groups (Norris and Inglehart 2004). On the whole, the gradual secularization of Western societies leads to the loss of religious identity as a source of distinct social and political values such as social conservatism.
Although most scholars throughout the twentieth century tended to agree that secularization characterizes most European societies irrespective of denomination (Dobbelaere 1985; Lechner 1991; Tschannen 1991; Wilson 1982), the secularization paradigm has been challenged on various fronts. There seems to be little evidence of secularization in competitive religious “markets” such as the United States (Finke and Stark 1998; see Gill 2001 for a review) or in Eastern European societies undergoing religious revivals (Evans and Northmore-Ball 2012; Northmore-Ball and Evans 2016). Several authors have also pointed out flaws in the secularization argument such as the use of a “romanticized” religious past as a reference point and excessive Eurocentrism (Swatos and Christiano 1999) as well as a restrictive focus on formal expressions of religiosity such as affiliation and church attendance (Davie 1994).
Religiosity and religious denominations have formed the basis of cleavages in several societies, with political parties stressing traditional moral issues such as abortion, euthanasia, and gay marriage (De Graaf, Heath, and Need 2001; Bolzendahl and Brooks 2005). These issues have been conceptualized as the social dimension of political competition contrasting moral traditionalism and conservatism with “progressive” liberal positions. Studies of the impact of religion on politics focus primarily on this dimension.
The study of religious cleavages and political choice very much falls into two perspectives, which differ in their understanding of sources of the influence of religious cleavages on political choice, how they change, and most importantly the mechanism linking religious cleavages and political choice. These perspectives echo the “bottom-up” versus “top-down” perspectives already presented for class voting. The earlier “bottom-up” perspective is rooted in three main bodies of research: first, that stemming from Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) seminal work on the historical origins of cleavages in Europe, the sociological work on the general process of secularization and waning of religion in Western societies, and finally the literature on the effects of economic modernization on social change. The second and newer perspective is based in the studies of the recent changes in party competition on Western democracies and focuses very much on the ability of political parties and elites to activate/de-activate the relevance of religious social divisions for political competition as well as the diversity in the strength of religious cleavages across countries and time (Evans and De Graaf 2013).
Lipset and Rokkan (1967) trace the origin of religious cleavages as the basis of political competition in Western societies to the Reformation and the ensuing conflict between the newly ascendant nation-states and the Catholic Church. They show how today’s political competition between religious voters who support conservative parties (particularly Social Democratic parties), which are often linked to the Catholic Church, and non-religious voters who support secular liberal parties can be traced back to the “frozen” church-state conflict of the Reformation. More recent work in this tradition looks at the legacies of communism in Eastern Europe for creating a secular-religious/nationalist cleavage thus creating competition between reformed communist parties and nationalist parties (Kitschelt 1994, 1999). The two later bodies of literature focus on the declining role of religion in society as scientific rationality becomes mainstream and increasing economic security reduces the attractiveness of religion as a source of social support. Overall, the “bottom-up” perspective emphasizes the blurring of religious divisions as the key mechanism of change: as religion loses its significance, the values of the nominally religious become increasingly similar to those of the non-religious. These changes are driven by large-scale, socio-structural processes such as modernization or industrialization, or major historical events such as the European Reformation (Lipset and Rokkan 1967) or the rise and collapse of Communism (Kitschelt 1999; Evans and Whitefield 1993; Whitefield 2002). The emphasis on these macro-level slow-moving processes and “frozen” social conflicts, however, limits the ability of the “bottom-up” approach to explain shorter term fluctuations in the relevance of religion for political choice; the “bottom-up” approach is fundamentally unidirectional.
The second “top-down” approach emphasizes that political elites determine the relevance of religion to political choice through their strategic considerations and position on ideological dimensions. The most recent version of the “top-down” approach focuses on the restriction of electoral choices rather than preference shaping as the mechanisms linking religiosity to political choice (Evans and De Graaf 2013). This supply-side approach emphasizes that political parties need to diverge on moral issues in order to make religion relevant. With a wider variety of options along the social dimension, the value differences between religious and non-religious people take on importance for political choice; these value differences will matter even if the overall numbers of religious voters may have declined due to secularization. Party polarization on the relevant value dimension should increase the magnitude of the association between religiosity and party choice, whereas convergence should weaken the association. The pressures for convergence tend to be more apparent in majoritarian than PR systems. The agents of change are political parties, although the impetus for the strategic behavior of political elites can lie in long-term social change.
The measurement of the effect of religiosity on vote choice, particularly in a comparative context, is complicated by difficulties in measuring religiosity itself. The common measures of denominational affiliation and church attendance vary in their meaning in different countries and for different denominations. For example, in Catholic contexts there is far greater social pressure for people to attend church, raising overall church attendance rates. Denominational affiliation as a measure raises the possibility of failing to capture religiosity due to “believing but not belonging” (Davie 1994, 2000) or over-estimating religiosity in contexts where nominal affiliation may have a strong presence (Evans and Northmore-Ball 2012). Also denomination is not a useful indicator in countries dominated by one religion (i.e., Catholicism in Poland or Spain, or Eastern Orthodoxy in Bulgaria or Russia). Church attendance however has not been found to under-estimate religiosity (Aarts et al. 2010) and church attendance levels have been found to be associated with levels of traditional religious belief (De Graaf and Te Grotenhius 2008).
The issues of measuring religiosity are related to the complexity in conceptualizing the idea of religious cleavage. The concept of religious cleavage can be said to capture two aspects: the individual and contextual. At the individual level, religiosity is related to how religious a person is; this can be captured by the frequency of church attendance or some measure of the intensity of religious belief (for example, the World Values Survey religious belief measures used in Norris and Inglehart 2004). The contextual effects of shared group consciousness can be captured by denomination. Presumably the contextual effects can persist even in the presence of declining levels of religiosity, for example, through the politicization of collective social identities.
After a few decades of much attention being devoted to religious cleavages by the likes of Lijphart, Lipset, and Rokkan, the study of religious cleavages entered a phase of neglect; in the 1980s and early 1990s most studies concluded that religion was in general decline and therefore irrelevant as a basis of competition for religious parties and even right-wing parties (Franklin, Mackie, and Valen 1992: 40; Franklin 1992), mirroring the general consensus on the decline of class and other social cleavages at the time (see Evans 1999; Evans and Norris 1999 for summaries of debate). This consensus on religious cleavages was challenged in the mid-1990s by arguments about the limits of the secularization thesis as well as the documented rise of “religious issues” in politics. Several studies began to show evidence for the persistence of religious cleavages (i.e., Elff 2007; van der Brug, Hobolt, and De Vreese 2009; Tilley 2015).
The latest empirical evidence on the impact of religiosity on voting shows a variety of patterns across both established and new democracies. The evidence shows that religion matters to vote choice overall but not in every country and to varying degrees. In several countries, religion is a more relevant cleavage than social class; these include the Netherlands, the United States, West Germany, and France (Evans and De Graaf 2013). The trends in religious voting show a decline in France, West Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands (Heath and Bellucci 2013; De Graaf, Jansen, and Need 2013; Gougou and Roux 2013; Elff 2013), but, in newer democracies such as Poland, Spain, and East Germany, religious voting appears stable (Orriols 2013; Letki 2013; Elff 2013). The United States stands alone among established democracies in displaying both strong evidence of religious voting as well as an absence of any decline; rather, there is evidence of a realignment as, for example, Catholic voters switched from the Democratic to the Republican Parties (Weakliem 2013).
The “top-down” political choice and “bottom-up” social change explanations apply to varying extents across the different countries, reflecting the variety of political and cultural conditions. Overall, however, recent empirical evidence favors the political choice explanation; with the exception of a few new democracies, the ideological differences between parties explain the strength of religious voting (Evans and De Graaf 2013). The effects of social change, in particular secularization, are clearly apparent in all Western European democracies as religion loses its importance. Secularization is even evident in the United States (Aarts et al. 2010; Evans and De Graaf 2013). However, the evidence on effects of secularization on political choice is not unequivocal given the lack of clarity in the links between social conservatism and religious attendance. Furthermore, the classic secularization thesis which points to the blurring of social heterogeneity and consequent decline in religiosity as societies modernize (Norris and Inglehart 2004) is of more limited relevance in countries outside Western Europe, such as Romania, Bulgaria, and Russia (Evans and Northmore-Ball 2012; Northmore-Ball and Evans 2016).
Until recently, studies on class and religious cleavages have argued that both have progressively faded as societies have undergone modernization and secularization; however, recent work on class and religious cleavages has displayed a more complex picture of fluctuations and varied trends. Current studies are more explanatory than descriptive, focusing on a “top-down” approach to cleavages which demonstrates the ability of party elites to activate and de-activate political cleavages by offering more or less choice on relevant issue dimensions. This “top-down” approach indicates that the strength and over-time changes in cleavages are country-specific and can fluctuate depending on the dynamics of party competition. The ability of parties to shape cleavages is connected with the decline of the intergenerational transmission of partisanship (see van der Brug and Franklin, this volume), thus enabling party signals to more effectively influence voter decision-making. Though class voting is less pronounced than during the lateindustrial era, economic and social differences between classes (namely social cleavages; see earlier discussion on the distinction between cleavages types) have persisted, and what the parties do and say to maintain or minimize class political cleavages, or to re-shape those cleavages with the rise of radical right parties and the decline of working class electoral participation, is significant. To summarize: the contributions of the seemingly contradictory approaches all point to a more general shift from vote choices being made based on long-term party loyalties to more fluid issue-based voting; class remains relevant but as the basis for issue positions rather than party loyalty.
Turning to religion, we find that, despite evidence of a general process of secularization in many Western societies, recent studies indicate that religious cleavages continue to be an important basis of party choice across many societies. In new democracies, particularly in Eastern Europe, religion has even undergone a revival, possibly providing a renewed basis of party preference. Again, party signals matter for levels of religious voting as they do for class.
In conclusion, the general pattern of development in this research tradition has been from descriptive concerns with more or less class/religious voting to an understanding of the sources of those differences in terms of the choices offered to voters, the dynamics of the relationships between parties and voters and, rather more weakly, examination of the mechanisms accounting for the relationship between social classes, religious groupings, and parties. These explanatory rather than descriptive concerns are likely to be the focus of new class and religious voting research in coming decades.
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