The Intergenerational Foundations of Class Voting: Social Mobility and Electoral Choice in Western Europe

Scholarly literature posits that the gradual changes in the occupational structure have transformed traditional patterns in class voting. On the one hand, left parties have survived to deindustrialization by co-opting an impressive portion of socially ascending voters. On the other, the recent increase in downward mobility has created an electoral reservoir for radical parties. Nonetheless, extant literature provides inconclusive evidence for the alleged consequences of social mobility as well as their reasons. To overcome this issue, the present study applies the Mobility Contrast Model, a cutting-edge approach allowing to identify class-specific mobility effects on voting, while holding other relevant factors constant and without departing from the well-known framework of OLS. Empirically, we leverage data from the European Social Survey (rounds 1-9) on voters' electoral choice and political attitudes across 19 Western European countries. All in all, our strategy enables us to draw a less simplistic picture of the intergenerational foundations of class voting in Europe. We show that current patterns in class voting result from a complex combination of three factors: voters' own class, their social origin, and their possible experience of mobility. Our research provides little to not support for extant scholarly accounts on the relation between social ascent and the left or social descent and radical politics, though without concluding that mobility is inconsequential for voting choice. While previous studies have empirically focused on average effects, ours adopts a peculiar approach to highlight that, although such effects may be indistinguishable from zero, mobility does influence voting choice in a substantial manner, though solely among certain social groups. The most notable findings concern occupational upgrading. On the one hand, it increases the size of the high-skilled service class, a group that is known to be close to left parties. On the other, social ascent depresses left voting among a non-negligible proportion of high-skilled service and non-service class voters. Because long-term economic transformations are likely to further shape European politics, it is vital to distinguish the mechanisms through which this occurs to predict future electoral developments.