The Democratic Class Struggle in Postwar Societies: Class Voting in Twenty Countries,1945-1990

Abstract

Studies on the relation between class and voting behaviour traditionally use measures of absolute class voting (Alford indices), and apply simple class schemes (a manual/non-manual class dichotomy). Almost all these studies showed that levels of class voting differed between countries and that declines in levels of class voting occurred in most countries in the postwar period. However, recently, scholars have argued that using measures of relative class voting (e.g. log-odds-ratios) and more detailed class schemes (e.g. the EGP class scheme) might yield different conclusions. In this article the tenability of this claim is tested analysing comparable data from twenty Western industrial democracies in the period 1945-90. The main finding is that the different measurement procedures do not lead to essentially different conclusions. Using various procedures, a similar ranking of the countries with respect to their levels of class voting was obtained: the Scandinavian countries and Britain having the highest levels of class voting, and the United States and Canada the lowest. Furthermore, on using the various procedures, declines in levels of relative class voting were indicated in the same countries (particularly the Scandinavian countries, Germany and Britain), while no evidence of substantial declines was found in others (Canada, Ireland, Luxembourg, Switzerland and The Netherlands).