Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-skm99 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-25T08:02:34.764Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Social Bases of Political Parties: A New Measure and Survey

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2022

Gary Marks Open the ORCID record for Gary Marks [Opens in a new window] ,
David Attewell ,
Liesbet Hooghe ,
Jan Rovny Open the ORCID record for Jan Rovny [Opens in a new window]  and
Marco Steenbergen Open the ORCID record for Marco Steenbergen [Opens in a new window]
Gary Marks*
Affiliation:
1University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, USA and European University Institute, Florence, Italy
David Attewell
Affiliation:
2University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Liesbet Hooghe
Affiliation:
1University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, USA and European University Institute, Florence, Italy
Jan Rovny
Affiliation:
3Sciences Po, Paris, France
Marco Steenbergen
Affiliation:
2University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
*
*Corresponding author. Email: marks@unc.edu
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article proposes a measure of the social structuration of political parties. The measure has some distinctive virtues. It assesses the social bases of partisanship from the standpoint of the political party, and it provides a simple and transparent method for assessing the relative weight of social-structural and behavioral factors for party composition. We illustrate the power of this measure through a comparison of political parties in 30 European countries since 1975.

Keywords

political partycleavagedealignmentsocial democracyChristian democracytraditionalauthoritariannationalist partiesgreenalternativelibertarian parties
Type
Letter
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 53 , Issue 1 , January 2023 , pp. 249 - 260
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Abou-Chadi, T and Hix, S (2021) Brahmin left versus merchant right? Education, class, multiparty competition, and redistribution in Western Europe. British Journal of Sociology 72, 79–92.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Alford, RR (1962) A suggested index of the association of social class and voting. Public Opinion Quarterly 26(3), 417–425.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Attewell, D (2021) Redistribution attitudes and vote choice across the educational divide. European Journal of Political Research. 1–22. Available from https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12486Google Scholar
Axelrod, R (1972) Where the votes come from: an analysis of electoral coalitions, 1952–1968. American Political Science Review 66(1), 11–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benedetto, G, Hix, S, and Mastrorocco, N (2020) The rise and fall of social democracy, 1918–2017. American Political Science Review 114(3), 929–939.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Best, RE (2011) The declining electoral relevance of traditional cleavage groups. European Political Science Review 3(2), 279–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bornschier, S (2010) Cleavage Politics and the Populist Right: The New Cultural Conflict in Western Europe. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Bornschier, S (2019) Historical polarization and representation in South American party systems, 1900–1990. British Journal of Political Science 49(1), 153–179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bornschier, S et al. (2021) How “us” and “them” relates to voting behavior—social structure, social identities, and electoral choice. Comparative Political Studies 54(12), 2087–2122.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Breiman, L (2001) Random forests. Machine Learning 45, 5–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brooks, C, Nieuwbeerta, P and Manza, J (2006) Cleavage-based voting behavior in cross-national perspective: evidence from six postwar democracies. Social Science Research 35, 88–128.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Butler, D and Stokes, D (1971) Political Change in Britain. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caramani, D (2015) The Europeanization of Politics: The Formation of a European Electorate and Party System in Historical Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dalton, RJ (2018) Political Realignment: Economics, Culture and Electoral Change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deegan-Krause, K (2006) New dimensions of political cleavage. In Dalton, R and Klingemann, H-D (eds), Oxford Handbook of Political Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 538–556.Google Scholar
De Vries, CE and Hobolt, SB (2020) Political Entrepreneurs: The Rise of Challenger Parties in Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Elff, M (2007) Social structure and electoral behavior in comparative perspective: the decline of social cleavages in Western Europe revisited. Perspectives in Politics 5(2), 277–294.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, G and Tilley, J (2012) How parties shape class politics: explaining the decline of the class basis of party support. British Journal of Political Science 42(1), 137–161.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans, G and Tilley, J (2017) The New Politics of Class: The Political Exclusion of the British Working Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gidron, N, Adams, J and Horn, W (2020) American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gingrich, J and Häusermann, S (2015) The decline of the working-class vote, the reconfiguration of the welfare support coalition and consequences for the welfare state. Journal of European Social Policy 25(1), 50–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goldberg, AC (2020) The evolution of cleavage voting in four Western countries: structural, behavioral, or political dealignment? European Journal of Political Research 59(1), 68–90.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Green-Pedersen, C (2019) The Reshaping of West European Party Politics: Agenda-Setting and Party Competition in Comparative Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harteveld, E (2021) Ticking all the boxes? A comparative study of social sorting and affective polarization. Electoral Studies 72. Available from https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2021.102337CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Häusermann, S and Kriesi, H (2015) What do voters want? Dimensions and configurations in individual-level preferences and party choice. In Beramendi, P et al. (eds), The Politics of Advanced Capitalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 202–230.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hobolt, S, Leeper, TJ and Tilley, J (2021) Divided by the vote: affective polarization in the wake of the Brexit referendum. British Journal of Political Science 51(4), 1476–1493.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hooghe, L and Marks, G (2018) Cleavage theory and Europe's crises: Lipset, Rokkan and the transnational cleavage. Journal of European Public Policy 25(1), 109–135.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kitschelt, H (1988) The rise of left-libertarian parties in Western democracies: explaining innovation in competitive party systems. World Politics 40(2), 194–234.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Knutsen, O (2018) Social Structure, Value Orientations and Party Choice in Western Europe. London: Palgrave Macmillan.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kriesi, H (1998) The transformation of cleavage politics: the 1997 Stein Rokkan lecture. European Journal of Political Research 33(2), 165–185.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lachat, R (2007) A Heterogenous Electorate: Political Sophistication, Predisposition Strength, and the Voting Decision Process. Baden-Baden: Nomos.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langsæther, PE (2019) Cleavage Politics in the 21st Century: How and Why Social Background Affects Political Preferences. PhD dissertation, University of Oslo, Norway.Google Scholar
Lipset, SM and Rokkan, S (1967) Cleavage structure, party systems, and voter alignments: an introduction. In Lipset, SM and Rokkan, S (eds), Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives. Toronto: Free Press, pp. 1–64.Google Scholar
Marks, G, Attewell, D, Hooghe, L, Rovny, J and Steenbergen, M (2022) Replication data for: The Social Bases of Political Parties: A New Measure and Survey. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TAI0UW, Harvard Dataverse, V1, UNF:6:aLtPfJO1vY3wgUfyEG1Nww== [fileUNF]CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marks, G, Attewell D, Rovny J, and Hooghe L et al. (2020) The changing political landscape in Europe. In Cotta, M and Isernia, P (eds), The EU through Multiple Crises. London: Routledge, pp. 20–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Norris, P and Inglehart, R (2019) Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Oesch, D (2006) Coming to grips with a changing class structure: an analysis of employment stratification in Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland. International Sociology 21(2), 263–288.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reiljan, A (2020) Fear and loathing across party lines (also) in Europe: affective polarization in European party systems. European Journal of Political Research 59, 376–396.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohrschneider, R and Thomassen, J (2020) Introduction: political representation in liberal democracies. In Rohrschneider, R and Thomassen, J (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Political Representation in Liberal Democracies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rohrschneider, R and Whitefield, S (2009) Understanding cleavages in party systems: issue position and issue salience in 13 post-communist democracies. Comparative Political Studies 42(2), 280–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rovny, J (2015) Riker and Rokkan: remarks on the strategy and structure of party competition. Party Politics, 21(6), 912–918.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schattschneider, EE (1960) The Semisovereign People: A Realist's View of Democracy in America. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.Google Scholar
Stubager, R (2010) The development of the education cleavage: Denmark as a critical case. West European Politics 33(3), 505–533.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zingher, JN (2014) An analysis of the changing social bases of America's political parties: 1952–2008. Electoral Studies 35, 272–282.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zingher, JN (2019) An analysis of the changing social bases of America's political parties: group support in the 2012 and 2016 presidential elections. Electoral Studies 60, 102042.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Supplementary material: Link

Marks et al. Dataset

Dataset

https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/TAI0UW
Link
Supplementary material: PDF

Marks et al. supplementary material

Online Appendix

Download Marks et al. supplementary material(PDF)
PDF 943 KB