Political Choice Matters

Explaining the Strength of Class and Religious Cleavages in Cross-National Perspective

Edited by Geoffrey Evans and Nan Dirk de Graaf

Helps students and scholars to understand multi-disciplinary enquiry combining pooled and case study analysis
Examines a unique international comparative data-set

Political Choice Matters

Explaining the Strength of Class and Religious Cleavages in Cross-National Perspective

Edited by Geoffrey Evans and Nan Dirk de Graaf

Description

Political Choice Matters investigates the extent to which class and religion influence party choice in contemporary democracies. Rather than the commonly-assumed process in which a weakening of social boundaries leads to declining social divisions in political preferences, this book's primary message is that the supply of choices by parties influences the extent of such divisions: hence, political choice matters. Combining overtime, cross-national data, and multi-level research designs the authors show how policy and programmatic positions adopted by parties provide voters with choice sets that accentuate or diminish the strength of political cleavages. The book gives central place to the positions of political parties on left-right, economically redistributive and morally conservative versus social liberal dimensions. Evidence on these positions is obtained primarily from the Comparative Manifesto Project, with a chapter dedicated to elaborating and validating the various implementations of this uniquely valuable source of evidence on party positions. The primary empirical focus includes case studies of 11 Western, Southern, and Central European societies as well as 'anglo-democracies' including Britain, USA, Canada, and Australia. These detailed analyses of election studies ranging in some cases from the post-war period until the early part of the 21st century are augmented by a pooled cross-national and overtime analysis of 15 Western democracies using a unique, combined dataset of 188 national surveys. The authors show that although there has been some overtime decline in the strength of association between social class and party choice, this is far smaller than the amount of change in the relationship occurring as a result of party movements on questions of inequality and redistribution. The strength of the religiosity cleavage is also influenced by changes in party positions on moral issues - changes that can be understood as a strategic response to a process of secularization that has weakened the electoral viability of parties deriving support from appeals to religious values.

Political Choice Matters

Explaining the Strength of Class and Religious Cleavages in Cross-National Perspective

Edited by Geoffrey Evans and Nan Dirk de Graaf

Part I: Models, Measurement and Comparative Analysis
1: Explaining Cleavage Strength: The Role of Party Positions, Geoffrey Evans and Nan Dirk De Graaf
2: Measuring Party Positions, Ryan Bakker and Sara Binzer Hobolt
3: Examining The Impact of Party Positions and Class Voting in 15 Western Democracies: A Pooled Analysis, Giedo Jansen, Geoffrey Evans and Nan Dirk De Graaf
Part II: The Case Studies
Anglo-Saxon Democracies
4: Ideological Convergence and the Decline of Class Voting in Britain, Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley
5: The United States: Still the Politics of Diversity, David L. Weakliem
6: The Declining Impact of Class on the Vote in Australia: Testing Competing Explanations, Gary Marks
7: The Class-Party Relationship in Canada, 1965- 2004, Robert Andersen
Mainland Europe
8: Enduring Divisions and New Dimensions: Class Voting in Denmark, Sara Binzer Hobolt
9: The Political Evolution of Class and Religion: An Interpretation for the Netherlands 1971-2006, Nan Dirk De Graaf, Giedo Jansen, and Ariana Need
10: Political Change and Cleavage Voting in France: Class, Religion, Political Appeals, and Voter Alignments (1962-2007), Florent Gougou and Guillaume Roux
11: Social Divisions and Political Choices in Germany, East and West, 1980-2006, Martin Elff
12: Class and Religious Voting in Italy: The Rise of PolicyResponsiveness, Oliver Heath and Paulo Bellucci
Recent Democracies
13: Do Social Divisions Explain Political Choices? The Case of Poland, Natalia Letki
14: Social Class, Religiosity, and Vote Choice in Spain, 1979-2008, Lluís Orriols
Part III: Concluding observations
15: The Importance of Political Choice and Other Lessons Learned, Geoffrey Evans and Nan Dirk De Graaf
Bibliography
Index

Political Choice Matters

Explaining the Strength of Class and Religious Cleavages in Cross-National Perspective

Edited by Geoffrey Evans and Nan Dirk de Graaf

Author Information

Edited by Geoffrey Evans, University Professor and Official Fellow Nuffield College, and Nan Dirk de Graaf, University Professor and Official Fellow Nuffield College

Geoffrey Evans' research interests include social divisions, inequality, and politics in Britain, models of voting behaviour, the evolution of class and ethno-religious cleavages, and democratic consolidation in postcommunist societies. In addition to many journal articles covering these topics he has produced several books including The End of Class Politics? (OUP 1999). He is University Professor and Official Fellow, Nuffield College, Oxford.

Nan Dirk De Graaf's research interests include empirical sociology in general, social stratification, especially educational attainment and consequences of social mobility, cultural sociology, sociology of religion and pro-social behaviour, and political sociology and criminology. He is University Professor and Official Fellow Nuffield College, Oxford.

Contributors:

Robert Andersen is Professor of Sociology and Political Science, University of Toronto.
Ryan Bakker is Assistant Professor in Political Science, University of Georgia
Paolo Bellucci is Professor of Political Science at the University of Molise, Isernia, Italy.
Nan Dirk De Graaf is Official Fellow in Sociology, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.
Martin Elff is Lecturer in European and German Politics, University of Essex.
Geoffrey Evans is Official Fellow in Politics, Nuffield College, & Professor of the Sociology of Politics, University of Oxford.
Florent Gougou is PhD Candidate in Political Science, Science Po, Paris.
Oliver Heath is Senior Lecturer in Politics, Royal Holloway, University of London.
Sara BinzerHobolt is Professor of European Institutions, European Institute, London School of Economics & Political Science.
Giedo Jansen is Postdoc researcher in Political Science, University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands
Natalia Letki is Assistant Professor in Sociology, University of Warsaw.
Gary Marks is a Principal Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research, Melbourne, Australia.
Ariana Need is Professor of Sociology and Public Governance, University of Twente, the Netherlands.
Lluís Orriols is Lecturer in Politics, University of Gerona.
Guillaume Roux is Research Scientist, Institute of Political Studies, Grenoble, France.
James Tilley is Fellow in Politics, Jesus College, & University Lecturer in Quantitative Social Science, University of Oxford.
David L. Weakliem is Professor of Sociology, University of Connecticut.

Political Choice Matters

Explaining the Strength of Class and Religious Cleavages in Cross-National Perspective

Edited by Geoffrey Evans and Nan Dirk de Graaf

Reviews and Awards

"The electoral coalitions assembled by parties of different ideological stripes in todays established Western democracies are not simply a reflection of cross-national or inter-temporal differences in social structure; they also respond to the programmatic appeals of the parties, and more specifically the strategic configuration of programmatic moderation or polarization among them. Drawing on the most comprehensive cross-national and cross-time dataset available to date, and supplemented by a battery of meticulous case studies, this book drives home this crucial point in a more convincing way than any previous study. It is required reading for anyone probing into the realignments of partisan politics in postindustrial democracies and looking for methodological guidance in advancing that enterprise." - Herbert Kitschelt, Duke University

"The question have the effects of social cleavages declined, and if so, how and with what consequences? is fundamental to political sociology, but political scientists and sociologists approach it in different ways and reach different conclusions, often talking past each other in the process. This book bridges the gap by focusing on the values (ideological and social) in the causal chain that links class and religion with party choice. This enables the authors to address both the individual and party aspects of cleavages. Their investigations are conducted in a variety of advanced democracies and on pooled time series data. The result is a powerful synthesis that will be required reading for scholars of both disciplines." - Mark Franklin, MIT

"Issues of social cleavages and their electoral consequences are central to the study of modern democracies. Both theoretically and empirically, this collection is the most important contribution to date to the analysis of these issues. Rival accounts of shifts in cleavage politics in terms of social structural and cultural change or party strategies that determine how far voters can in fact express their class or religious interests, are rigorously formulated and evaluated using both cross-national analyses and national case studies. Quantitative sophistication is combined with sensitivity to institutional and historical specificities. The collection is essential reading for a wide range of social scientists, not to mention party leaders and their advisers." - John Goldthorpe, Nuffield College

"take this book not only as a significant milestone, but also as a springboard to invent new indicators of class and party politics." - European Sociological Review