The Democratic Class Struggle in the United States, 1948-1992

Abstract

We present evidence of a historic realignment in the relationship between class and voting behavior in U.S. presidential elections in the postwar period. We take advantage of recent advances in class analysis and statistical methodology to introduce a distinction between "traditional" class voting and "total" class voting. Neither shows a decline in the postwar era. The realignment occurred since 1968, as professionals and nonmanagerial whitecollar workers movedfrom voting for Republicans to supporting Democratic presidential candidates. Stronger'support for Republicans among the selfemployed and among managers has more than offset the shift of professionals and nonmanagerial white-collar workers to the Democrats. Skilled bluecollar workers have become volatile, moving away from their historic support for the Democratic Party withoutfirmly attaching themselves to the Republican Party. Significant class differences in voter turnout also contribute to the total association between class and voting outcomes. Scholars and political activists have long debated the role of class divisions in U.S. politics. At mid-century, research on the "democratic class struggle" (Anderson and Davidson 1943) was a central concern of the sociology of politics. The seminal studies of political behavior in the 1950s featured detailed analyses of the organizational and sub

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

“…Here the advantages of the log-odds-ratio over the Alford index are more relevant, since in this case the distribution of the classes and the voting behaviour are regularly more skewed than 25:75 Hout et al 1995). Using our seven class EGP scheme it takes six logodds-ratios to measure all the differences in voting behaviour (left/right) between these classes.…”

Encontrando lo que nunca estuvo perdido. Conciencia de clase y conflicto de clases en el régimen neoliberal chileno

“…En efecto, este esquema ha sido ampliamente usado en el estudio de la conciencia de clases, la movilidad social, el comportamiento político, y otras actitudes derivadas de las diferencias de clase (cf. Andersen y Heath, 2002;Evans, 1997;Hout et al, 1995;Marshall et al, 1988;Svallfors, 2006;Wormald y Torche, 2004). Además, se ha demostrado que la estructura de clases chilena puede ser representada fielmente a partir de los principios básicos de este modelo (Torche, 2006).…”

Neo-liberalism, Partisanship, and Public Policies

“…cleavages by shifting "to the right" their political platform for the governance of network industries? This argument derives from the idea that economic liberalization may have created a progressive outcome during the last decades over 'class voting' (Clark and Lipset 2001;Nieuwbeerta and De Graaf 1999), as social class schemes are deemed to have been modified in post-industrial society (Butler and Savage 1995;Esping-Andersen 1993;Hout et al 1995;Kriesi 1989;Manza and Brooks 1999). In this respect, the race towards liberalization policy (Pitlik 2007) which has characterized OECD countries in the last three decades may have changed the structure of political competition in such a way to become a post-ideological 'must have' receipt in political parties' policy toolkit, independently of their respective traditional cleavages.…”