Changing Party Electorates and Economic Realignment

Changing party electorates and economic realignment Explaining party positions on labor market policy in Western Europe Dominik Geering and Silja Häusermann, University of Zurich [email protected], [email protected] Abstract Socio-structural change has led to important shifts of voters, such as middle class voters increasingly voting for the left and working class voters increasingly voting for the populist right. These electoral shifts blur the voter-party alignments, which prevailed during the post- war period. Consequently, comparative politics scholars have started to question whether parties still represent the class interests of their voters. Most contributions answer this question negatively, arguing that parties have detached themselves from the class profile of their electorates. We argue that this conclusion is erroneous as it relies on assumptions on and measures of class structuration that are outdated. We show that the class profile of party electorates still predicts parties’ positions on labor market policies. However, these voter- party alignments become observable empirically only if we a) use a post-industrial schema of class stratification to characterize party constituencies and b) distinguish between different dimensions of labor market policy, notably redistribution and activation. For our analysis we explore the class profiles of electorates and party positions on labor market policies in Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK. We use two sources of data: Micro-level survey data (ISSP 2000 and 2006) and a newly compiled data set on party positions during electoral campaigns in the 2000s. We have three main findings. First, we show that the distinction between working class and middle-class parties does not explain party positions anymore, because the middle class has expanded and become heterogeneous. Political support for redistribution today relies on political parties representing the postindustrial middle class. Second, the “old” vertical class conflict between working class and middle class parties today revolves around activation policies, not redistribution. And third, working class parties that mobilize their voters based on cultural appeals oppose generous redistributive policies. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that the representative link between class electorates and party positions has not vanished, but transformed fundamentally in ways that profoundly restructure welfare politics in postindustrial societies. 1 1. Introduction Representation is a key element of democratic quality. In a very fundamental sense, democracy is about making citizens’ opinions present in the policy process (Pitkin 1967). The election of political parties is supposed to ensure this link between voters, party positions and policy outputs. During the post-war period, the alignment of socio-structural groups and political parties has been used as an important indicator for the representation of these groups in the political process (e.g. Castles 1978; Hibbs 1977; Lijphart 1975; Lipset and Rokkan 1967). However, since the 1990s several high-profile studies, such as the study by Franklin et al. (1992) on socio-structural and electoral change argue that the programmatic links between specific social groups and political parties have weakened considerably over the past three to four decades, concluding that we are witnessing the disappearance of class voting. This conclusion is based on the finding that the distinction between being a blue- or a white-collar worker has lost most of its explanatory power in predicting electoral choice. Subsequent contributions by Evans (1999) or Oesch (2006), however, showed that when using a class-scheme adapted to the post-industrial occupational structure (where skill-levels and sector matter more than manual vs. non-manual labor), socio-structural determinants keep a much stronger explanatory capacity with regard to electoral choice. Against the claims of disappearing class voting, they thus showed that social groups still have distinct and identifiable links to specific parties, but the groups have changed and the parties they support have changed, as well. The literature has termed this process “realignment” (Dalton, Flanagan, and Beck 1984; Martin 2000), meaning that parties adapt their programmatic profiles in order to align onto the changes in the profile of their electoral constituencies, thereby creating new programmatic links with their voters (see Bornschier (2009) for a discussion of this debate). Given the transformative socio-structural change that has characterized Western European societies over the past decades, electoral realignment has become a key object of party research. Most of the existing realignment-literature studies the extent to which parties have shifted their programmatic profiles in order to align with the socio-cultural concerns of their new electorates (Bornschier 2010; Kitschelt 1994; Kriesi et al. 2008). The realignment of parties 2 and voters regarding economic issues, by contrast, has so far hardly been studied systematically1. Two factors explain this focus of party research on cultural realignment: the novelty and saliency of the socio-cultural cleavage on the one hand, and an outdated conceptualization of the economic dimension on the other hand. First, the sheer novelty of the topic: the emergence of a highly salient socio-cultural dimension of party competition, opposing universalistic-libertarian to traditionalist- authoritarian policy preferences certainly counts among the most far-reaching and consequential changes in West European politics in the past decades. While the economic class-conflict, opposing advocates of state intervention to market-liberals, used to be the clearly dominant cleavage line structuring both party choice and party competition until the 1990s (Bartolini 2000), this socio-economic dimension of party politics has been complemented by a socio-cultural dimension whose effect on individuals’ party choice has become about equally strong (Lachat and Dolezal 2008). Moreover, the emergence of this socio-cultural dimension is highly relevant, because it became both a driver and a reflection of the two major socio-structural shifts that have transformed West European party electorates: parts of the educated middle-class shifted to social-democratic and green parties who proved responsive to their universalistic-libertarian preferences, whereas parts of the working class deserted the left, being drawn to (populist) right-wing parties who responded to their more traditionalist-authoritarian values. The extent to which parties have adapted their programmatic stance on topics such as immigration, environmental protection or women’s and gay rights to precisely these voter shifts is what we term “cultural realignment”. Besides the relative novelty of the socio-cultural dimension and its transformative effect, the second factor that accounts for the relative neglect of economic realignment in the literature on parties and party systems is that this literature has not taken into account the transformation of the economic conflict dimension. The comparative political economy and welfare state literature has argued and shown extensively that distributive conflict today 1 Exceptions are to be found only in adjacent fields, such as the welfare state literature, see e.g. Rueda (2005), Schwander (2012) or Picot (2012). 3 cannot be conceptualized as a mere opposition between more or less welfare spending anymore (Bonoli and Natali 2012; Esping-Andersen 1999; Gingrich 2011; Häusermann and Kriesi 2011, Häusermann 2012). In times of fiscal pressure and sharpened distributive conflict, the economic cleavage itself has become multidimensional: preferences form with regard to specific kinds of economic policy, rather than just general levels of welfare generosity or redistribution. An actor may, e.g. favor cutbacks in existing unemployment insurance benefit levels, while at the same time advocating expansive active labor market policies. Such a position cannot be represented adequately on a single state-market dimension. If we position parties only on a single state-market dimension, we may underestimate party differences and miss out on the policy positions that are relevant to their specific electorates. As the most direct negative consequence, neglecting the study of voter-party alignments on economic policies leads to the misinterpretation of shifts in party positions and party strategies. In particular, much of the current literature interprets changing party positions by referring to external constraints, such as globalization or institutional rigidities (e.g. left- wing parties moving towards more moderate positions on redistribution or right-wing parties defending existing social insurance programs). However, it may very well be that these parties’ positions have changed – relative to their traditional policy profile – because they represent different socio-structural groups (Häusermann et al. 2013). Consequently, investigating voter-party alignment is also crucial to understand reform dynamics and reform potentials. In other words: the analysis of the partisan politics of the welfare state without an eye on the underlying socio-structural electoral transformations is flawed. For our analysis, we draw on new data from an ongoing comparative research project that compares electorates and party positions in several European countries. In this paper, we analyze the relationship between class electorates

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