Voter interpretation of parties’ class cues

Despite the prevalent perception that “class is dead”, current scholarship consistently documents the continued existence of large class-based differences in social outcomes. Likewise, studies of electoral behaviour continue to find class differences in party choice just as political parties continue to appeal to social classes in their rhetoric – although less so than decades ago. Recent research has shown such class appeals – particularly to the working class – to be effective in attracting sympathy and increasing the propensity of votes across broad swathes of the electorate, i.e. not only among the working class. But how do such effects come about? What do voters infer from parties’ class rhetoric? To address these questions, thereby improving our understanding of the mechanisms behind group based political rhetoric, the paper investigates voters’ reactions to appeals to the working class or the upper middle class using responses to open-ended questions about voters’ thinking. The questions were embedded in an experimental survey of a representative sample of Danish voters and were hand coded across a range of parameters. The results show that voters generally accept class based rhetoric and connect it to issues of inequality. Furthermore, voters’ reaction to parties’ class appeals are conditioned by their interpretation of the appeals with stronger, and more emotional, effects observed among those whose reasoning is based on the groups involved. Finally, while the analyses show that voters harbour perceptions of parties’ traditional class alliances, they also document that such perceptions do not undercut the effectiveness of the appeals themselves. In other words: also parties not traditionally aligned with the working class can use appeals to that class to increase their standing in the electorate. The results thereby advance our understanding of the role of social groups in parties’ competition for votes.