Comparative European Politics https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-019-00189-y ORIGINAL ARTICLE Bringing background back in: A Dutch new party and the revival of socio‑economic background voting J. H. P. van Spanje1 · R. Azrout1 © Springer Nature Limited 2019 Abstract Western democracies have witnessed gradual decline of voting according to socio- economic background factors. However, the emergence of elderly parties suggests increasing mobilization along generational lines, which would partly reverse this pattern. While religion and class voting have decreased, such new generational divide might make age, education and income salient (again). However, to what extent is support for these parties driven by such mobilization—rather than by a-political protest, or by politics as usual? Focusing on 50Plus in the Netherlands, the most successful current Western elderly party, we fnd evidence for mobilization on a new divide. Many older, less educated voters who feel poor vote for 50Plus, irrespective of their feelings of mere protest or their position on dominant policy issues. Furthermore, perceptions of 50Plus substantially vary with age and income combined. Our fndings suggest that 50Plus heralds the emergence of a novel divide. To what extent this divide revitalizes socio-economic background factors in Western politics remains to be seen. Keywords New parties · Elderly parties · Elections · Socio-economic background · Economic voting Many established democracies have seen a decline of socio-economic background voting in recent decades. This decline has probably started prior to 1960 in some countries, while it had already been completed by then elsewhere (Franklin 1992: 394). Franklin and his collaborators saw such decline by examining age, gender, class, church attendance, education, and urban residence in 16 Western countries (Franklin et al. 2009). Evans and De Graaf (2013: 399) see “evidence of such decline”, focusing on religion and class voting in 17 countries in total. Although they do not fnd decline “across the board”, the general trend is downward. * R. Azrout [email protected] 1 Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Vol.:(0123456789) J. H. P. van Spanje, R. Azrout However, democratic systems are constantly in fux. Most importantly, new polit- ical ideas are being infused into the everyday politics of these systems on a perma- nent basis. This means that one has to entertain the possibility of a stop, a change, or even a reversal, of the decline of socio-economic background voting. New ideas are often carried by new political parties. It is possible that a category of new parties would turn the present-day electoral logic in established democracies on its head. An obvious candidate to do so would be a party type that aims to mobilize a socio- economic category such as voters of a certain age, educational level, or income. Concerning age, education, and income, seniors’ parties are “a potential new party family in the making” (Hanley 2010: 2). They have sprung up across the Western world. In Western Europe, only three countries “saw no grey interest par- ties form: Iceland, Ireland and France” (Hanley 2010: 3). In Eastern Europe, Hanley (2010: 4) found pensioners’ parties everywhere except in Albania, Latvia, Lithuania and Moldova. Pensioners’ parties have held government ofce in Israel, Serbia, and Slovenia—in Croatia a grey party supported a minority government (Hanley 2010: 5). The present study focuses on today’s most successful of all, a Dutch party called ‘50Plus’. In 2017, the party underlined its electoral success by doubling its number of seats in the Dutch national parliament. This study analyses the characteristics of its electorate. It tests to what extent the vote for this party is driven by the longstand- ing cleavages that have dominated Western politics, by traditional ideological and issue voting, by new issue voting, by a-political protest, or by a new divide. In doing so, this study addresses the questions of to what extent a new divide has become visible, what this divide entails, and to what degree the divide is likely to infuence Western electoral politics in the near future. The socio‑economic background vote Socio-economic background voting is commonly linked to “cleavage” structures. In their classic account, Lipset and Rokkan (1967) describe such cleavages as enduring lines of confict in democratic politics that stem from large-scale socio-structural transformation processes. Lipset and Rokkan identify four cleavage types: church versus state, capital versus labour, urban versus rural, and centre versus periphery. In accordance with Evans and De Graaf (2013), we restrict our literature review to reli- gion and class voting here, relating to the frst- and second-mentioned cleavage— arguably the most prominent of the four in most European countries today. Religion voting has declined in many Western countries. A study of six countries demonstrates decline of religion in voting behaviour in the Netherlands between 1970 and 1998 but not in the fve other democracies (Brooks et al. 2006). The efect of religion on voting in the 1989 European elections was stronger than in more recent ones (Van der Brug et al. 2009). Yet religion continues to be an important factor for the conservative and Christian Democratic vote (Van der Brug et al. 2009; Duncan 2015). Class voting has decreased in several Western countries too (Evans and De Graaf 2013). There is evidence of declining class voting in several countries such Bringing background back in: A Dutch new party and the revival… as Britain (Franklin and Mughan 1978; Heath 2013), and Switzerland (Rennwald 2014). A study of twenty Western democracies from 1945 until 1990 fnds increas- ingly diminishing class voting in a majority of these countries (Nieuwbeerta 1996). Brooks et al. (2006) fnd class voting in two out of six countries trending downward. A more recent study of ffteen Western countries from 1960 until 2005 also fnds an increasingly weaker link between social class and left-wing versus right-wing voting over time in most of these democracies (Jansen et al. 2013). Taken together, socio-economic factors explain increasingly less of party choice in Western democracies. At present, religion and class do not explain much of the variance in voters’ electoral preferences (cf. van der Eijk and Franklin 2009). Obvi- ously, this situation may change. Religion, class, or other characteristics such as education, income or age may start to play a larger role at any given time in any given place. Regarding education, income, and (most importantly) age, this may already be the case right now in several countries. This is because new societal and political actors have started to mobilize on a generational divide, pitting (especially the less educated yet wealthier) elder parts of the electorate against (in particular the poorer) younger voters. A key role here is played by a particular type of political actor, new political parties. After all, established actors and parties are “programmatically infexible” (Hooghe and Marks forthcoming, p. 1) so that change mostly comes from new parties—just as in this case. New parties The mid-20th-century party systems were said to be “frozen” (Lipset and Rok- kan 1967). In accordance with this observation, these systems saw few new parties emerge. Unsurprisingly, most of the literature on new parties is quite recent (e.g. Hug 2001; Tavits 2006; Bolleyer 2013; Grotz and Weber 2015; Van de Wardt et al. 2017). At a time when new parties were hardly studied except in the context of US politics (Pinard 1971; Sundquist 1983), Hauss and Rayside (1978) were among the frst to study new parties in several Western countries. Hauss and Rayside saw a link between political cleavage structures, demand for particular new policy issues, and the emergence of new parties. Studies by Rosenstone et al. (1984) and by Harmel and Robertson (1985) underlined the importance of social, political and structural factors, including new policy issues. More generally, it was found that “neglected or new issues are often at the heart of the emergence of new parties” (Hug 2001, p.3; cf. Zons 2015). New parties have been divided into “challenging parties”, that mobilize on exist- ing cleavages, and “mobilizing parties”, that mobilize on new issues and identities (Rochon 1985). Lucardie (2000) built on this distinction, calling the frst “purifying parties”, the latter “prophetic parties”, and adding a third category of “prolocutors”. Prolocutors are parties that mobilize on new issues without claiming to have any broader coherent ideology to build from. Clearly, prophetic parties and prolocutors that succeed in mobilizing a sizeable electoral support can alter electoral politics in J. H. P. van Spanje, R. Azrout ways that undercut vestigial patterns of socio-economic background voting—or, in fact, introduce or reinforce new patterns. Apart from their direct efect, new parties may also have indirect efect on pat- terns of socio-economic background voting. “Even without making electoral inroads, newly formed parties are relevant, as existing parties may react to their emergence and their policy oferings” (Zons 2015, p. 920). Such responses by established par- ties include non-issue-based reactions such as establishing a cordon sanitaire around a new rival (van Spanje and Brug 2009; van Spanje 2010a). More importantly for the present study, such responses by established parties may also encompass issue- based reactions such as dismissive, adversarial, and accommodative tactics (Meguid 2008). Accommodative tactics in response to, for instance, anti-immigration parties means co-opting of its immigration policy issue position, which has been shown to be related to anti-immigration party success at the polls (van Spanje 2010b; Han 2015; Abou-Chadi 2016). New elderly parties Successful prophetic parties and prolocutors, and reactions from established par- ties they trigger, may thus change electoral competition. More specifcally, they may change the basis on which voters decide to cast a vote for one party or another, or abstain.