Class Voting in Western Europe

Oddbjørn Knutsen is professor of political science at the University of Oslo.

This book is a 'must-read' for scholars wanting to understand class voting in comparative perspective. Knutsen clearly demonstrates that class vote is on the decline in eight major European democracies since the early seventies — no matter what measures are used. The analysis is a major contribution to the social cleavage literature inspired by Lipset and Rokkan, and to comparative politics literature in general.

• Part 1 Part I: Theories and explanations for the decline in class votingChapter 2 IntroductionChapter 3 Social mobilityChapter 4 New social divisionsChapter 5 Cognitive mobilizationChapter 6 The embourgeoisement thesisChapter 7 New Politics and middle class radicalismChapter 8 The debate about the political orientations of the service classChapter 9 Party strategy, class appeal and changes in class structureChapter 10 The debate about the persistence or decline of class votingPart 11 Part II: Class schema and operationalizations of social classChapter 12 The Erikson/Goldthorpe class schemaChapter 13 Operationalization of social class: Occupation variables and construction of class variables in the Eurobarometer data set.Part 14 Part III: Party systems, party families and the party choice variableChapter 15 Voting intention in the Eurobarometer dataChapter 16 Party families and trends in support for the various partiesChapter 17 Socialist/non-socialist party choicePart 18 Part IV: Total class votingChapter 19 IntroductionChapter 20 The strength of the correlationChapter 21 Statistical measures for tapping class votingChapter 22 Party familiesChapter 23 Patterns within countries and changes over timeChapter 24 Conclusions: Main patterns regarding changes over timePart 25 Part V: Overall left-right (socialist/non-socialist) class votingChapter 26 Overall left-right voting for the whole periodChapter 27 Trends in overall left-right class votingPart 28 Part VI: Traditional class voting: Socialist/non-socialist party choiceand the two class variablesChapter 29 Introduction: The relevance of traditional class voting in advances industrial democracies and how it is measuredChapter 30 Empirical analysis: Trends in traditional class votingChapter 31 Class voting according to a different treatment of the routinenon-manual groupPart 32 Part VII: Explanations for changes in class votingChapter 33 IntroductionChapter 34 Hypotheses about trends and cross-national patterns of class votingChapter 35 Explaining trends in class voting within countries over timeChapter 36 Explaining the cross-national variations in level of class votingChapter 37 Pooled time-series cross sectional analysesChapter 38 Part VIII: ConclusionsPart 39 Part IX: Literature