When Supply Creates Demand: Social Democratic Party Strategies and the Evolution of Class Voting

Abstract

This paper focuses on the policy strategies adopted by social democratic parties and their impact on the class basis of their support. It is argued that political appeals matter for explaining the development of class voting. This argument is tested through a comparison of the policy strategies of social democratic parties in Austria and Switzerland and the evolving patterns of class voting in the two countries. Using election surveys and data on the policy positions and media representation of the political parties from the 1970s to the 2000s, the article finds that the Social Democratic Party in Austria maintained a strong working class base. In contrast, the Social Democratic Party in Switzerland facilitated a major transformation of the class basis of its support by emphasising new cultural issues. It became the party of the ‘new middle classes’, leaving the working class to realign in support of the Swiss People’s Party.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions that have greatly improved the article. We would like to thank Hanspeter Kriesi for having made available to us the data on political parties from the research project ‘National Political Change in a Globalizing World’.

Notes

1. Which is not to say that the appeals of political parties do not also reflect bottom-up influences: parties can react to the changes in the shape of the social structure and the sizes of their support bases by adapting their programmes (e.g. Przeworski and Sprague 1986).

2. The moderating effect of cross-cutting social cleavages has often been emphasised in the consociationalism literature (see Daalder 1974; Pop-Eleches and Robertson 2011). Powell (1976) has shown evidence that people in cumulative cleavage positions will be stronger partisans than those in cross-cutting cleavage positions.

3. Socio-cultural specialists can be defined as ‘wage-earners in social and cultural services’ who ‘do not have major managerial responsibilities’ (Oesch and Rennwald 2010a: 346) and evolve on a daily basis in ‘interpersonal work logic’ (interactions with students, patients, clients, etc.) which make them particularly likely to hold cultural liberal views (Oesch and Rennwald 2010a: 346–47).

4. We limit the samples to national citizens.

5. It is often the broad categories (blue-collar workers, white-collar workers, civil servants) from the German tradition of the ‘Berufliche Stellung’ which are used. The importance of using a more detailed class position has been noted in the literature (Evans 1999, 2000).

6. The only exception is Austria 1990 where party preference is used. The people who do not declare any party preference have been placed among the non-voters.

7. The authors show few differences for measurement of party positions if one uses media data instead of party manifestos or expert judgements. For the salience, the indicators are less convergent, suggesting a different emphasis by the parties during election campaigns or some media influence (Helbling and Tresch 2011).

8. Alternatively, we also give information on the log odds ratio for two categories of interest, the working class and the socio-cultural specialists (small business owners = reference category). In Austria, the coefficients for the working class (respectively the socio-cultural specialists) are the following: 1971: 2.53 (1.47); 1983: 2.28 (1.00); 1990: 2.49 (1.73); 2002: 1.09 (0.17); 2006: 1.08 (0.70); 2008: 1.68 (1.11). In Switzerland: 1971: 1.15 (0.76); 1975: 1.84 (1.81); 1995: 0.75 (1.33); 1999: 0.59 (1.56); 2003: 0.44 (1.10); 2007: 0.11 (0.96).

9. The ‘kappa’ index is 0.10 in 1971. It declines to 0.05 in 2007.

10. The overall stability of the class cleavage over time in Switzerland (irrespective of which classes support which parties) has been shown by Lachat (2007).

11. Such a reduction in class voting for this period has been also shown by Hug and Trechsel (2002) and Trechsel (1995).

12. The ESS 2002 is chosen because Austria is included in this wave and it offers a second economic question on trade unions and labour market in order to construct the economic axis.

13. An additional analysis (available in the online appendix) shows the answers to the four attitude questions by class in the two countries. It confirms that both countries share a similar class pattern of preferences.

14. The dependent variable is constructed by combining the two economic questions from the principal components analysis to form an index. Accordingly, ordinal regressions are performed, with class as an independent variable, and with sex and age as controls. Language is introduced in a second model.

15. This analysis is available in the online appendix.

16. A similar trend to the left for the end of the period is reported by Jensen et al. (2013) on the basis of CMP data. Their results for the 1960–2005 period generally suggest fluctuations in the position of left-wing parties in Austria. With CMP data, Fagerholm (2013) distinguishes a clearer ‘neoliberal’ trend in the position of the Austrian Social Democratic Party in the period 1970–99.

17. At the voters’ level, Wagner and Kritzinger (2012) show that citizens’ positions on the socio-cultural dimension of competition is unrelated to the choice between the Social Democratic Party and the Christian Democratic Party. This suggests that Social Democratic Party voters in Austria are not particularly liberal on this dimension of competition.

18. Secondary literature points to similar trends for the 1980s. Ecological issues dominated the campaign of social democrats at the 1987 election (Sidjanski 1988).

19. The inclusion of anti-immigration statements does not change the picture: immigration issues have a low salience among the social democrats’ electoral statements. The 1994 election in Austria is an outlier, as a restrictive immigration position was much emphasised by the social democrats.

20. In Austria, it was 10.7 per cent in 2009 (OECD 2011: 41).