Structural and Ideological Voting in Age Cohorts

Abstract

In most West European countries the effects of long-term determinants of the vote − in particular social class, religion and left–right ideology − have slowly weakened since the late 1980s. This paper first describes differences between the EU member states in the extent of structural and ideological voting in the period 1989–2004. It then focuses on the causes behind the changes over time. It is hypothesised that the decline is partially caused by generational replacement (H1). More specifically, it is assumed that structural voting is most important for the generation born before 1950, and politically socialised in the years of the mass party (H2) and that ideological voting is most important for the generation born between 1950 and 1970, who were politically socialised after the decline of cleavages and before the fall of the Berlin Wall (H3). To test these hypotheses, the study employs the European Elections Study 1989, 1994, 1999 and 2004. The country by year combination provides data from 62 political contexts. To analyse the determinants of party choice across different countries and years, a methodology is employed that was developed by Van der Eijk and Franklin in Choosing Europe (1996). The study provides support for all three hypotheses.

Notes

1. According to Bartolini and Mair (1990), cleavages have three components: social structure, values structure and organisation (see also Enyedi 2008). According to them, cleavages exist only when the three elements coincide and reinforce each other. Whenever I use the term cleavage in this text, I refer to cleavages in the same way as defined by Bartolini and Mair (1990: 216). However, the analyses in this paper focus only on one of the three aspects of a cleavage: the effect of social structure on the vote. In line with Enyedi (2008), I therefore use the term structural voting, rather than cleavage voting.

2. I realise that other structural positions may also have become important, besides social class and religion. Also, other ideological dimensions than left–right may have become important to voters. However, social class and religion were cleavages on the basis of which parties have been founded in many West European countries. Also, left–right is still the dominant dimension along which party systems are organised − even though left–right has a different meaning in different historical contexts. Since class, religion and left–right are important for structuring the supply side, they have always been important determinants of the vote. After all, voters can only choose among the parties on offer. For that reason, a study of changes in the extent to which social class, religion and left–right determine the vote is important in its own right. Whether other structural positions have become important as well, is also a relevant question, but is beyond the scope of this paper.

3. We do this, even though we are not specifically interested in respondents' vote in the European Parliament elections, in order to be able to weight our data to the actual (known) election outcome, enabling us to correct for most forms of sampling bias that might be present in our different national samples.

4. In practice the parties asked about included only those with representation in the national parliament or those which are high enough in the polls to obtain such representation.

5. The vote propensities are most strongly related to the intended vote in national elections (the question ‘if there were elections today for the national parliament, which party would you vote for’). About 93 per cent of the respondents would vote for the party to which they give the highest vote propensity score.

6. I employ this subjective measure of social class, rather than categorisations based upon profession, because this variable is available in all surveys in the same form and thus most comparable across time.

7. These scores present problems of analysis unless they are centred around the same mean for all parties. In practice we subtract the mean value for each party, turning all of them into deviations from zero.

8. I previously checked whether the inclusion of interactions between religious affiliations and church attendance would add substantially to the explained variance, but did not find this to be the case. By adding many new predictors to these regressions that each exert a minor effect, this procedure runs the risk of capitalising on chance. Therefore, I did not include these interactions when predicting the y-hats for religion.

9. The original effect is negative: frequent church-goers are less likely to support the Republikaner than those who never go to church. As a consequence of the linear transformation of the independent variable ‘religion’, the direction of the effect (positive or negative) is no longer visible.

10. I checked for multicollinearity. The tolerance of the interaction terms is never below 0.20, and all VIF statistics of the interactions are below 5. The only somewhat problematic estimate is the main effect of left-right distance, where the VIF is 11 and the tolerance 0.09. However, these collinearity statistics must always be evaluated in relation to the sample size. With a sample of more than 30,000 respondents, there is so much statistical power that one still obtains highly reliable estimates even with these levels of multicollinearity. The low standard errors and high significance of the effect of left–right distance bears evidence to this.

11. The most recently available survey differed per country (between 1984 and 1987).