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We argue that this conclusion is erroneous as it relies on assumptions on and measures of class structuration that are outdated.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. 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 and party positions with regard to labor market policy in Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK in the 2000s. The paper is structured as follows: In a first theoretical part (section 2), we review the arguments that different strands of the literature put forward regarding economic alignment and realignment. In a second part (section 3), we present our own argument on

4 voter shifts and policy dimensions, and we formulate our hypotheses on the conditions under which we expect the alignment of voters and party positions. A fourth section presents our case selection, data and methods, before we present the findings of our analyses in section 5. Section 6 presents a summary and conclusion of our findings.

2. Theory: what do we know about voter-party alignments on economic issues?

While cultural realignment, its dynamics, drivers and consequences have become a key topic in research on political parties and representation2, we have rather little economic evidence on the dynamics of economic alignment and realignment. Despite the lack of empirical research, however, we find a range of arguments about the (non-)representation of economic interests of the electorates in the literature. Most of the existing contributions argue that parties are not aligned economically with their voters, either because they do not aim to represent their electorates’ interests anymore, or because they cannot do so anymore. More precisely, we identify three strands of literature that speak to this topic3: the cartel party literature, parts of the welfare state literature and the literature on dealignment and cultural realignment.

First, the cartel-party literature (Katz and Mair 1995) argues that parties have disengaged themselves from voters. More precisely, it is argued that parties have converged on the economic dimension for both exogenous reasons – globalization – and ideological macro- trends (Blyth and Hopkin 2011; Blyth and Katz 2005), irrespective of the preferences of the voters. Implicitly, this literature suggests that we may still find well-identifiable electorates of specific political parties, but parties have become unwilling to deliver economic policies beneficial to these groups because of cartelization.

2 A few words on terminology and concepts: Our analysis of representation coincides largely with Bartels’ idea of congruence. Bartels makes a distinction between congruence and responsiveness. Responsiveness refers to a dynamic process of interest representation, i.e. parties are responsive if they follow shifts in the preferences of their voters and vice versa However, as Bartels argues, policy-makers may be responsive at the margin, even though their policies differ strongly from what the public wants. Consequently, the literature on policy congruence is interested in the correspondence between the voters and policy-makers (governmental elites and parties), rather than dynamic shifts. Our approach is therefore also related to the concept of “party representation” , which implies that parties offer policy alternatives and that these alternatives are congruent with the preferences of their voters. 3 Kitschelt and Rehm (2012) provide a similar review of the dealignment-, cartel-party and realignment literature, without, however, discussing the welfare state literature.

Similarly to the cartel-party argument, and as a second strand of literature, prominent authors of the welfare state literature have also suggested that political parties may converge in their positions on distributive policies for reasons of blame-avoidance (Pierson 2001) or exogenous constraints (Huber and Stephens 2001). While Blyth and Hopkins (2011) argue convergence on a neo-liberal programmatic stance, Pierson (2001) expects convergence on a more status-quo oriented, welfare-state preserving position. However, in both cases, party-positions are explained exogenously, irrespective of the particular profiles of the respective party constituencies. As with the cartel party literature, a shift in the policy profile of a political party is interpreted as a disengagement from the voters.

The cultural realignment literature takes a counter-position to the arguments on party cartelization and exogenous constraints. It argues that parties are still responding to identifiable electorates, but they respond to their socio-cultural preferences and not their economic preferences. The starting point in this literature is the fact that parts of the middle class voters have moved to the left (Kitschelt 1994) and parts of the working class voters have shifted to the right (Bornschier 2010; Kitschelt and McGann 1995; Oesch 2008). It is argued that these shifts were the result of the increased saliency of the socio-cultural dimension of party competition. Hence, the cultural realignment literature assumes that all parties have shifted their attention entirely to the socio-cultural axis, and “gave up” on the economic dimension (Bale et al. 2010; Kriesi et al. 2008).4 In a similar vein, the dealignment literature (Dalton 2008; Dalton, Flanagan, and Beck 1984) has argued that with the transition to post-industrialism and the decline of mass-parties (Mair 1997, 99-100), the stable link between class electorates and economic policy positions has vanished. However, in contrast to the realignment literature, they argue against a stable realignment of programmatic linkages and party identification, and instead contend a more general rise in selective issue-voting and electoral volatility.

4 The assumptions this literature makes regarding the actual economic preferences of the transformed electorates are diverse: Kitschelt (1994) assumes some sort of convergence on moderate positions, while Bornschier (2010) highlights the heterogeneity of the “new” electorates regarding economic attitudes and Kriesi et al (2008) seem to assume that electorates have remained largely stable regarding their economic attitudes. These differences, however, do not matter much as they agree that the economic axis has become largely irrelevant for voter-party representation and mobilization.

Even though they do not address it explicitly and empirically, both the cultural realignment and the dealignment literatures give us important insights for the study of the alignment of voters and parties on the economic dimension of party competition: first, the realignment literature presents important empirical evidence on the main electoral shifts of the past decades and the appropriate analytical tools to categorize these shifts socio-structurally. The dealignment literature, on the other hand, highlights that the dimensions of party competition have become substantially more diverse and representation may be more issue- specific than in the past. Building on this, our task in this paper becomes to link the updating of our knowledge on the composition of party electorates with an adequate conceptualization of the economic issue-dimensions.

3. The argument : voters, issues and conditions for economic alignment

Social classes are the historically and politically most important socio-structural category that political parties have mobilized (Lipset and Rokkan 1967, Bartolini 2000). Still now, parties much more often refer to class interests rather than gender, age or religion when articulating who they want to represent. This is because occupational classes have retained a strong effect on political preference formation, as they have remained important “milieux” for political socialization and they are categories that capture similar life conditions in an adequate way (Kitschelt 1994, Evans 1999, Kriesi et al. 2008, Oesch 2006). Hence, our perspective on the socio-structural electorates of political parties also centers around the class-structure of these electorates. However, we contend that simply distinguishing between working-class parties and middle- or upper-class parties does not get us far in explaining what the economic needs and preferences of the respective electorates are. Rather, we need the appropriate analytical tools to categorize electorates’ profiles adequately in the post-industrial context. In this section, we present our take on how to conceive of the recent socio-structural voter shifts and how we expect them to affect voter- party alignments regarding labor market policy.

7 Regarding the transformation of party electorates, we know from an ample literature that the social structure has changed radically since the 1970s, bringing about major electoral shifts. The most important aspect of this change is the expansion and growing heterogeneity of the middle class. With tertiarization, educational expansion and growing female education rates, European labor markets have become “upgraded” and the middle class has expanded massively, especially in the field of postindustrial employment such as high- skilled public and private service employment (Oesch and Menés 2011). This expansion and feminization has led to a clear “horizontal” divide within the middle class into what we call a postindustrial and an industrial middle class. We distinguish between these two parts of the middle class on the basis of the class scheme proposed by (Oesch 2006), which explicitly conceptualizes this horizontal segmentation that is so characteristic of the postindustrial occupational context. The industrial middle class includes employers, small business-owners, technical specialists such as engineers and high-skilled managers. The postindustrial middle class, by contrast, comprises high-skilled employees in client- interactive public and private service sector jobs. Employment expansion was strongest in precisely these occupations over the past 20-30 years, so that the postindustrial middle class today represents between 15 and 20 percent of the workforce in most European countries (Oesch and Menés 2011). The divide between the postindustrial and the industrial middle classes has a very clear-cut political correlate: while the industrial middle class votes mostly for the moderate right, the postindustrial middle class has become an important electorate of the left, especially the Greens and Social Democrats (Kitschelt 1994; Kriesi 1998; Oesch 2008). Even though the voters of the post-industrial middle class have shifted to left-wing parties mostly out of cultural reasons, i.e. their support for universalist and libertarian values, their vote choice also corresponds to their preference for generous redistributive policies, while the industrial middle classes tend to support more market-liberal solutions (Esping-Andersen 1999; Inglehart 1984; Kitschelt 1994; Kriesi 1999; Oesch 2006).

A similar “horizontal” divide has emerged within the working class. Also in this segment, job growth has been strongest among low-skilled postindustrial employment such as public and private services, whereas deindustrialization has reduced jobs in industrial manufacturing throughout Europe. Again, we can distinguish between a postindustrial and

8 an industrial working class (Häusermann 2010; Oesch 2006): the industrial working class includes routine and skilled workers in manufacturing jobs and in the industries (the traditional blue-collar workers), as well as skilled office clerks, whereas the postindustrial working class comprises low-skilled service jobs and routine office jobs (think of call-center agents, waiters, nannies etc). The political consequences of this diversification of the working class are to date much less well explored than the ones for the middle classes. What we do know, however, is that blue-collar workers are most likely to have shifted to right- wing – usually right-wing populist – parties (Bornschier 2010; Bornschier and Kriesi 2012; Oesch 2012, Gougou and Mayer 2013) and that abstention is much more widespread among the postindustrial working class than among the industrial working class (Häusermann and Schwander 2012). However, the political affiliation of the postindustrial working class remains more contested (see e.g. the debate about whether Social Democrats are insiders parties or not, Rueda (2007) and Schwander (2012)). Regarding the preferences of the working class, the scholarly literature has presented ample empirical evidence that – despite their heterogenous party affiliations - the working class supports generous economic policies (e.g. Häusermann and Kriesi 2011; Kitschelt and Rehm 2004, 2005).

In sum, the traditional – vertical – class-divide between middle and the working class has been supplemented by a new – horizontal – class-divide between postindustrial and industrial classes. These socio-structural changes have had far-reaching implications for the electoral profile of political parties: some traditional working class parties (such as Social Democrats) may have become middle-class parties and the other way round. The important point we want to make here is that the loosening of traditional voter-party links does not mean total volatility and dealignment. We may still find clear socio-structural patterns of party voting (e.g. Kitschelt and Rehm 2011; Oesch 2012), which we, however, overlook if we do not distinguish between post-industrial and industrial classes and their political preferences. Also, it is only by taking this horizontal class structuration into account that we can distinguish between political parties that mobilize voters mainly around socio-economic issues (such as the social democratic parties or moderate right-wing parties) and parties who mobilize on the basis of socio-cultural issues, such as the green parties or the right-wing populists. These socio-cultural parties capitalize on the horizontal class divides presented

9 above and their incentives to align with the economic preferences of their voters are clearly lower than the incentives of the economically mobilized parties (Häusermann and Kriesi 2012).

We are now ready to formulate a set of conditions under which we still expect alignment, i.e. under which we still expect the socio-structural profile of the party electorate to predict the policy positions of a party. The first condition is that we take the horizontal class divide seriously. We hypothesize that (H1) the distinction between middle class and working class constituencies does not explain difference in the positioning of parties on economic issues. In other words, knowing the share of middle vs. working class voters among a parties’ electorate does not tell us anything about the parties’ economic policy profile, because it does not inform us adequately on this electorate’s political preferences. Rather, it is only when differentiating middle class and working class constituencies further in terms of postindustrial and industrial classes that we can grasp the patterns of economic alignment and distributive party conflict.

Our second hypothesis is based on cultural realignment theory. As the class structure of West European societies has changed, politics has adapted to these change. In the realm of party politics, a new socio-cultural conflict between universalists and traditionalists has come to the forefront, most importantly mobilized by the New Left (e.g. green parties) and the New Right (right-wing populist parties) (Oesch 2012). These parties mobilize their voters based on socio-cultural issues, not economic ones. Middle class voters of the New Left have a strongly universalist, egalitarian and also welfare-friendly preference profile, while the industrial working class voters of the right-wing populist parties seem to adhere to the more welfare-critical and neoliberal discourse of these parties. Therefore, we expect the link between the voter profile and party positions to go in the opposite direction for parties mobilizing on economic vs. cultural issues: working class parties should support generous labor market policies more strongly than middle class parties if these parties mobilize along socio-economic issues, but more weakly than middle class parties if they mobilize along socio-cultural issues (H2). If hypothesis 2 is confirmed, the implications are tremendous: traditional partisan politics theory assumes the working class to be pro-redistribution and the

10 middle class to be more market-liberal. If this relationship is reversed as parties mobilize along socio-cultural issues, this would mean that the “new politics” might have far-reaching indirect effects on the political economy of West European states by breaking up traditional alliance potentials and creating new ones.

4. Case selection, data and coding

For our study of economic alignment, we select countries that differ in the extent of electoral change their party systems have experienced. As a shortcut for electoral change, we select countries5 that have experienced the rise of green or right-wing populist parties to different degrees: Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK. 6 Within this selection of countries, we restricted the analysis to political parties for which more than 40 observations were available in the survey data we use to identify party. In addition, we limit our study to labor market policy, i.e. all policies that deal with employment performance, unemployment benefits and employability of individuals. We chose labor market policy as an example of economic policies because it addresses unemployment as one of the key problems of Western democracies and because most policies have clear-cut distributive implications given the fact that unemployment and atypical employment is distributed very unequally across classes.

Data and coding For our analysis we investigate the class constituency profile of parties and the positioning of political parties with regard to labor market issues. To identify the class constituency profile of parties we rely on the ISSP data from 20017 and 2006. We use the Oesch (2006)

5 By selecting countries rather than individual parties, we take into account that political parties form constituent elements of a party system (Sartori 1976) and that the parties orient themselves vis-à-vis their competitors (see Kitschelt (1994) for this argument within the realignment literature; more generally: Adams, Merrill and Grofman (2005)). 6 For example, regarding right-wing populist parties the Swiss right-wing populist parties SVP is the strongest party in the party system while there was no significant right-wing populist parties within our period of analysis in the UK or Germany. Regarding green parties, Switzerland and Germany both have strong green parties, whereas in Denmark, Netherlands and especially the UK green parties are much weaker. 7 For the Netherlands we use the ISSP 2000, as Netherland is not part of the ISSP 2001.

11 class scheme, defining as “working class” all individuals with general, vocational and low skilled and as “middle class” all respondents with higher professional and managerial skills. We exclude the 10 percent of respondents with the highest income in order to drop the upper class from the analysis. We then define as “industrial” class voters all respondents with independent, technical or organizational work logic and as “post-industrial” all respondents with interpersonal service work logic. We also define as post-industrial the routine office employees, because they are mostly in the service sector. On this basis of working class/middle class and post-industrial/industrial characterization of voters class position, we calculate the average electoral class profile of the respective parties at the two time points of the surveys. We use the average of both observation points to operationalize the class constituency profile of the political parties under investigation.8 As a robustness-test, we have also calculated the class profiles with data from the Eruopean Social Survey (rounds 1- 3) with very similar results.

To identify the positions political parties take on labor market issues, we have coded statements made by these parties in the national legislative elections9, because elections are crucial in the voter-party-link (Mair 2008) and thus for the alignment of parties and voters. Following the work by Kriesi et al. (2008, 930), we consider “political debates during election campaigns, as reflected by the mass media” as an appropriate way to catch a party’s position. Rather than relying on party manifestos (as used in Kim and Fording 1998, 2002, 2003) or expert surveys (as used in Huber and Powell 1994; Kitschelt and Rehm 2011; Powell Jr. 2000). This focus enables us to both include all saliently debated issues during the election campaign and to grasp the positions of a party as it is perceived by the voters. The disadvantage of our approach is that we have to rely on newly collected data, which limits the number of countries, issues and elections included because it is very demanding in terms of resources.

8 Ideally, we would have chosen the Comparative Study of Electoral System (CSES)-data in order to match the identification of the constituencies with the respective electoral campaigns on which we observe party positions. Unfortunately, the CSES do not include data on the occupation of the respondent measured in ISCO88-4-digit-codes (only at the 2-digit-level) which we need to construct our class scheme. 9 The national elections are: Denmark 2001, 2007; Germany 2002, 2005; Netherlands 2002/2003, 2006; Switzerland1999, 2007;UK 2001, 2005.

12 We applied newspaper content analysis to identify the positions of political parties in the media. For the selection of the time periods, newspapers and newspaper articles, we followed again the work by Kriesi et al. (2006, 2008), i.e. we chose for each country a quality newspaper and a tabloid and analyzed their articles two month prior to the national elections.10 We coded all sentences containing statements of political parties on labor market policy.11 We then recoded all statements as expressing a party’s position in favor of or against one or several of the three possible reform issues: redistribution, retrenchment and activation. For each issue, the party received a value of 1 if the statement supported it, -1 if it contained a statement against it and “missing” if it did not refer to this policy direction at all.

This brings us to the difficult and important issue of identifying the relevant policy dimensions on which to observe alignment. Many studies still work with a single dimension of more vs. less generous policies. However, an ample literature has shown that this may be highly inadequate, since welfare policies today are structured along several distinct conflict lines, such as redistribution vs. social insurance (e.g. Häusermann and Walter 2010; Iversen and Soskice 2001; Rehm 2011), benefit levels vs. eligibility (e.g. Bonoli and Natali 2012; Bonoli and Palier 1998) or social investment (active social policies) vs. income replacement (passive social policies) (e.g. Jenson 2012, Morel et al. 2011, Häusermann 2012). For the field of labor market policy, is has been shown repeatedly that preferences regarding activating policies follow a different logic from income replacement policies (Bonoli 2010, Fossati 2013). In this article, we thus follow recent work on the study of political conflicts (Kriesi et al. 2008; Laver 2001) and identify the relevant dimensions empirically by means of factor analysis. More precisely, we performed a principal component factor analysis for each country with redistribution, retrenchment and activation as the variables and the country’s political parties at the two time points (the two election years, see footnote 9) as observations. The findings are robust in all countries (not shown), indicating a first factor composed of redistribution and retrenchment (with EV between 1.7 and 1.95) and a second

10 The newspapers are: Denmark: Jyllands Posten, Ekstra Bladet; Germany: Süddeutsche Zeitung, Bild; Netherlands: Algemeen Dagblad, NRC Handelsblad; Switzerland: Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Blick; UK: The Times, The Sun. 11 Following this procedure we gathered the following number of statements for each election: Denmark 360; Germany: 654; Netherlands: 285; Switzerland: 754; UK: 359.

13 factor on which only activation loads strongly, and which reaches Eigenvalues around 0.9-1 in all countries. We interpret this finding as indicating that labor market policy is structured along two dimensions: redistribution/retrenchment and activation, which is in line with the existing literature on this topic (Bonoli 2010, Fossati 2013). Hence, we compose two dependent variables “redistribution” and “activation” on which we measure party positions. We operationalize these variables by means of factor analyses and factor scores, with the analyses done at the level of each country separately and with two time point observations by party. We then take the average factor score as the position value of the respective party. Consequently, in the following analyses we explain the factor scores as dependent variables by the class composition of the party electorate as independent variables. We now turn to these analyses.

5. Empirical analysis

The empirical analysis has two parts. In a first part, we identify the electoral class profile of the political parties in the five countries we analyze. In the second part, we use these electoral profiles to explain party positions on labor market issues.

5.1. Identifying the electoral profile of political parties

To determine the class profile of party electorates, we situate each party with regard to the composition of its electorate in terms of middle vs. working class voters and in terms of postindustrial vs. industrial class voters. To do so, we proceeded in two steps: in a first step we calculated the difference between middle- and working class votes and compared this difference to the average difference in the country’s social structure (as a reminder: we dropped the top 10% income earners from the analyses in order to exclude the upper classes from the analysis). The value on the horizontal axis in figure 1 thus represents the deviation of the party electorate from the country mean.12 Parties with a positive value have an

12 As countries differ in their class structure, we have calculated class profile of electorates as a deviation from the country-specific class structure. If, for instance, a country overall has 60% middle class voters and 40% working class voters, our score describes the deviation from this country-specific difference. This would mean that a party with 70% middle class voters would have a score of 10 (i.e. the deviation from the country mean).

14 overrepresentation of middle class voters in their electorate, whereas workers are overrepresented in parties with a negative value. In terms of our theoretical terminology, this value is related to the vertical class divide of the party electorate. In a second step, we applied an analogous procedure to determine the horizontal class-divide of the party electorates by calculating the difference between postindustrial and industrial class votes.13 In figure 1, the horizontal class-divide is shown on the vertical axis. We then represent parties in a two-dimensional space of vertical and horizontal class composition of the electorate, which gives us four quadrants: the more a party is situated on the top right corner, the more it has a postindustrial middle class profile. The more a party is located in the bottom right corner, the more its voters belong to the industrial middle class. Postindustrial working class parties are situated in the top left corner, whereas industrial working class parties are situated in the bottom left corner.

We use deviations from the mean, because this helps us integrate the idea that parties hold “core constituencies”. For example, postindustrial middle class voters might not be the largest constituency for green parties. But green parties mobilize these voters over-proportionally (with regard to the country specific class structure). By standardizing by country specific, we are able to integrate this fact in a straightforward way. 13 This means that for working class parties (negative value on the horizontal axis), the vertical axis indicates the share of new working class votes, whereas for middle class parties (positive value on the horizontal axis), the vertical axis indicates the share of new middle class votes.

Figure 1: Class profile of party electorates: Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Switzerland and the UK

Three findings are particularly striking in figure 1. First, most parties in the five countries we selected (Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Switzerland, and UK) are middle class parties. Only 8 out of 25 parties represent more working class than middle class voters (relative to the country average). In addition, among the working class parties, only the Danish People’s party exceeds the 25% points mark of working class overrepresentation. There are much more pronounced middle class parties, with the liberal and green parties showing up to 40 percentage points of middle class over-representation. This first finding reflects the strong “upgrading” (Oesch and Menés 2011) that European labor markets have experienced, meaning that the job structure and the social structure generally have moved massively towards middle classes.

16 The second important finding in figure 1 refers to the fact that traditional left-wing and labor parties have clearly lost their dominant position in representing workers. Indeed, left parties’ electoral class profiles range from clearly middle class (the Swiss Social Democrats and the Dutch Socialist People’s Party) to about average (the German, British and Dutch Social Democrats) to workerist (the Danish Social Democrats). On the contrary, both right- wing populist parties in our sample – the Swiss People’s party as well as the Danish people’s party – show a working class electoral profile. This finding illustrates the electoral transformations left-wing parties have experienced in some countries. In the light of figure 1, it seems rather misleading to even still think of them as being in a same party family.

Finally, as a third finding we want to highlight the stronger variance with regard to horizontal class divides that we find among middle class parties as opposed to working class parties. All working class parties center on the average share of postindustrial/industrial working class voters. This is in line with the expectation we discussed in the theory part, according to which the horizontal class divide is more important for the middle class than for the working class.

5.2. Explaining party positions with class profiles

In this section, we relate the electoral data shown in figure 1 to party positions on labor market policy issues, in order to evaluate voter-party alignment, i.e. the extent to which the socio-structural profile of the electorate predicts party positions. Figure 2 shows a scatterplot of the vertical class profile of political parties on the x-axis and, on the y-axis, the positions of the political parties on the redistribution dimension, i.e. their level of support for redistribution. If working class parties supported more generous policies than middle class parties, we would see a negative relationship between the two variables. However, in line with our first hypothesis, we find no such association.

Figure 2: Class profile of party electorates and support for redistribution

It appears clearly that the vertical class divide does not explain the variance in support for redistribution. This finding echoes a wide range of scholarly work about the disconnection between class constituencies and party positions. Most of the literature interprets this finding as proof that parties cannot take their voters preferences into account anymore, or that they do not want to do so anymore. We disagree. We have precisely argued in our first hypothesis that no connection between the class profile of the electorate and policy positions can be expected unless we introduce the horizontal class divide, i.e. the difference between postindustrial and industrial classes into our analyses.

5.2.1. Finding I: support for redistribution depends on middle class parties In the next step, we thus test whether the addition of the horizontal class divide increases the explanatory traction of the socio-structural profile of the electorate for party positions. Table 1 shows the results of our analyses using OLS-regressions. Model 1 corresponds to figure 2,

18 the dependent variable being the factor score on redistribution and the independent variable bing the vertical class profile of the political parties. It confirms that the vertical class profile of the electorate does not explain party positions on redistribution at all. Model 2 includes the horizontal class divide and model 3 an interaction term of the two class-divides, because we argue that the horizontal class dynamics play out differently among the working class and the middle class. Models 4-6 repeat the analogous analyses for the second dependent variable “activation”.

Table 1: Class parties and support for redistribution and activation

Looking at models 2 and 3, we see that the horizontal class divide does have a strongly significant effect on the position of parties regarding redistribution. The more the share of voters from post-industrial classes increases relative to voters from the industrial working or middle class, the more the party supports redistribution. In addition, the inclusion of this variable raises the explanatory power substantially as shown in the R². The interaction term in Model 3 does not reach significance, but we investigate this conditional relationship graphically, in order to understand to what extent the distinction between industrial and post-industrial class voters matters within the middle and the working classes.

Figure 3 shows the marginal effect of an increase in the of post-industrial profile of the electorate on the party’s position on redistribution. The x-axis reflects the vertical class divide: as we move from left to the right the electorate of parties becomes more middle class compared to working class. Hence, figure 3 shows how the effect of the horizontal class- divide (postindustrial versus industrial) differs for working class parties (negative values on the vertical class divide) as compared to middle class parties (positive values on the x-axis). It appears clearly that the interaction effect is significant only for middle-class parties. For working class parties, the industrial/postindustrial class profile of their electorate does not affect their position on redistribution significantly. However, for middle class parties, the horizontal class-divide has a significant effect (confidence interval above the line): parties mobilizing the postindustrial middle class are more strongly supportive of redistribution than parties mobilizing the industrial middle class. This preference distinction between the postindustrial and the industrial middle class explains why the vertical class profile alone does not explain positions on redistribution. However, figure 3 only provides information on the marginal effect, but does not tell us anything about the level of support for redistribution. From figure 3, we do not know which parties support redistribution the most.

20 Figure 3: Marginal effect of the industrial/postindustrial electoral class profile on party positions regarding redistribution

Figure 4 provides this information by showing on the x-axis the electoral profile of the party in terms of the horizontal class divide, and on the y-axis the parties’ positions on redistribution. The most important result in figure 4 is that political parties with a pronounced postindustrial middle class profile (such as the Danish Socialist People’s Party, the Greens or the Social Democrats in Switzerland or the Dutch Green-left Party) are the strongest supporters of redistribution. The main conflict about redistribution today is not between working class electorates and middle class voters, but within the middle class. Traditional middle class parties, such as market-liberal and Christian democratic parties are least supportive of redistribution. For working class parties, the industrial/postindustrial class divide is less relevant in terms of variation. They show an overall strong support for redistribution, except for the Swiss People’s Party and the Danish People’s Party (a finding we will come back to below when discussing hypothesis 2). The implications of figures 3 and 4 are tremendous: for comparative political economy research, they imply that the distributive conflict over redistribution is not structured along vertical class stratification anymore, which undermines basically all contributions that directly and indirectly refer to the Meltzer-Richard model of redistributive politics. Poltitically, the finding implies that the

21 political coalition supporting redistribution in the postindustrial context is composed of postindustrial middle class parties and parts of the working class parties (but not all).

Figure 4: Horizontal class divide and party positions regarding redistribution

5.2.2. Finding II: the conflict opposing working class and middle class voters is about activation, not redistribution Looking at the same analyses for the dependent variable “activation” (models 4-6), table 1 shows that the conflict structure clearly differs from the one we found regarding redistribution. Here, the vertical class-divide (as opposed to the horizontal one) indeed has significant explanatory power. The coefficient is positive, i.e. parties with a large middle class electorate support activation more strongly than working class parties. Figure 5 confirms that neither working-class parties’ nor middle-class parties’ positions on activation depend on the horizontal class profile of their electorate.

22 Figure 5: Marginal effect of the industrial/postindustrial electoral class profile on party positions regarding activation

Figure 6 illustrates the patterns of preferences that are reflected in the regression coefficients. We see that middle class parties almost unanimously support activation, irrespective of the specific (industrial or postindustrial) middle class profile. This support might be explained by the fact that activation – as part of the social investment strategy – relies less on opportunities for people to work, rather than income replacement (Vaalavuo 2013). Therefore, some working class parties (representing more low-skilled voters) are more skeptical about such policies, such as the German Linke and the Dutch SP, which criticize activation policies as workfare. Other working class parties, however, support activation, especially in Denmark and the Netherlands, where these policies have been strongly developed for a long time. In sum, while the middle class is divided regarding redistribution, it is unanimously in support of activation. In countries that lack a highly developed tradition of activation policies, working-class parties are more skeptical towards activation. Hence, if we want to talk about the relevance of the vertical class conflict in the electoral arenas of post-industrial societies at all, we will find it rather around the issue of activation than redistribution.

23 Activation is the new issue that has the potential to put middle class against working class preferences. This also implies, that the policy-coalitions that may form around redistributive or activating reforms will differ, with the postindustrial middle class voters being the pivotal class that can ally either with the old middle class in support of activation or with the working class in support of redistribution.

Figure 6: Horizontal class divide and party positions regarding activation

5.2.3. Finding III: the “new” working class parties oppose redistribution

In the third step, we test hypothesis 2, which argued that political parties mobilizing their voters on cultural grounds will have different positions on distributive politics than political parties mobilizing voter economically. As argued above, we expect the relationship between the class profile of the electorate and support for generous labor market policies to go in opposite directions for the two types of parties.

24 We create a dummy variable indicating political parties that have emerged by mobilizing with regard to the cultural cleavage of party competition (Kriesi et al. 2008), i.e. the green and the right-wing populist parties. Table 2 provides the regression analyses, introducing this dummy variable both in a linear and in an interaction model.

Table 2: Class parties, new politics and support for redistribution and activation

Both the vertical class profile of a party and the mere information if the party mobilizes culturally or economically do not provide significant information. However, in model 9, which introduces the interaction effect, all variables are significant with the effects pointing to the expected directions. If parties mobilize along socio-cultural issues, an increase in middle class voters increases the support for redistribution, while it decreases the same leve of support among those parties mobilizing along socio-economic issues. Figure 7 shows marginal effect of the dummy variable going from 0 to 1 (i.e. comparing a party mobilizing economically with one mobilizing culturally) on support for redistribution. We see that among working class parties (left side on the x-axis) going from economic to cultural mobilization decreases the support for redistribution, while the effect is opposite (and almost significant) among middle-class parties. This implies that among the “new” political parties who have emerged in the wake of the cultural mobilization of the 1970s and 1980s, the assumptions underlying the traditional “partisan politics approach” (Häusermann et al.

25 2013) have inverted: working class parties oppose redistribution, while middle class parties support it.

Figure 7: Marginal effect of mobilizing voters with regard to cultural issues on party positions regarding redistribution

This reverse relationship is clearly shown in figure 8 where the fitted lines show the relationship between the vertical class-divide and support for redistribution for the two types of political parties. The effect, however, only holds for redistribution while we find no effect on activation (therefore relationships not shown graphically). This result just adds more evidence to the finding that emerges from our analyses: the link between the class profile of party electorates and the parties’ distributive policy positions has not vanished, but is has transformed fundamentally in the postindustrial society.

26 Figure 8: Vertical class divide and party positions regarding redistribution

7. Conclusion

Both in the scientific literature on the decline of class cleavage voting and cultural realignment and in the public debate, much has been said about parties being increasingly disconnected from their voters. Against the early arguments of the literature on the decline of the class cleavage (Franklin et al. 1992), later research has shown that voting patterns still follow socio-structural lines, but the relevant socio-structural categories have changed (Evans 1999). However, the literature on cultural realignment argues that these new socio- structural voter-party links do not reflect the alignment of voters and parties on economic issues anymore, but on cultural topics such as immigration or cultural liberalism (Kriesi et al. 2008). We argue that these conclusions are premature: in order to actually test to what extent political parties are still aligned with the class profile of their electorate, we need to jointly update our conceptualization of party electorates and of the issues of distributive policy that structure such alignment. More precisely, we need to study voter-party

27 alignments with regard to the multiple relevant dimensions of welfare politics, these being redistribution and activation in the case of labor market policy.

Our empirical analyses have delivered three key findings. First, the analysis of party electorates has demonstrated how strikingly and massively parties’ electoral class profiles today differ from what we know (or assume) they have been a few decades ago. Most parties in the 2000s are middle class parties. This is particularly true for the green parties, who mobilize a decidedly middle-class electorate. However, the most impressive finding relates to working class votes: while social democratic parties differ strongly in the extent to which they still mobilize workers (the Swiss Social Democrats have even clearly become a clear middle class party), right-wing populist parties have the most clearly distinct and consistent working class electorate of all parties. This finding has important implications for a wider literature in comparative politics and comparative political economy, the most obvious being that the variable “social democratic power” loses much of its analytical meaning, as it encompasses parties with very different class profiles.

Second, our analyses have shown that the distinction between middle class and working class parties needs to be supplemented by the distinction between postindustrial and industrial classes to explain party positions on labor market issues. Our findings show that postindustrial middle class parties today are the strongest supporters of redistribution. This finding is line with earlier studies, which have argued that the postindustrial middle class has become one of the main pillars of the welfare state (e.g. Häusermann 2010; Kitschelt 1994). Working class parties are their main allies in their support for redistribution. At the same time, postindustrial middle class parties are also the strongest supporters of activation policies. Here, however, they share similar positions with the other (industrial) middle class parties, while working class parties are more skeptical about activation. Hence, the postindustrial middle class has become the pivotal coalitional player for expansive welfare reform, in a policy space that is deeply transformed as compared to the industrial era.

Finally, our analyses show that the emergence of “new politics” in the 1970s and 1980s, i.e. the mobilization of a second, socio-cultural cleavage in addition to the economic cleavage,

28 has important implications for distributive politics, as well. Among parties mobilizing along socio-cultural issues (such as immigration, ecology or cultural liberalism and authoritarianism), the traditional voter-party-alignment on distributive issues reverses, with middle class parties strongly supporting redistribution, while working class parties opposing it. Among the parties that have emerged on the basis of the economic class cleavage, however, traditional “partisan politics” assumptions hold more valid, with working class parties supporting redistribution more strongly than middle class parties.

Overall, 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. Hence, we need to take changes in party politics into account when studying distributive politics in West European countries. Three changes are key: the changing class structure, requiring us to conceptualize class profiles of electorates in new terms; the changing foundations of voter-party mobilization, which creates different programmatic links between socio-structural electorates and parties; and changing conflict dimensions in the distributive policy space.

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