POLICY
Class Still Matters for Policy Attitudes and Voting, but It’s Complicated
by William W. Franko and Christopher Witko
During the Industrial Era in affluent democracies in the West, lower class individuals generally supported egalitarian economic policies and left parties, while upper class individuals typically preferred less redistribution and conservative parties.
As deindustrialization has occurred, working class voters have become less likely to support left and center-left parties, such as the Labour Party in the U.K. and the Democratic Party in the U.S. Has class become irrelevant to policy attitudes and voting in the U.S.?
In a recent article in Political Research Quarterly, “Class, Policy Attitudes and Presidential Voting in the Post-Industrial Era” we argue that class remains very relevant to U.S. politics, albeit in a more complicated manner than during the Industrial Era.
Specifically, we argue that class still predicts egalitarian/liberal or inegalitarian/conservative economic policy attitudes, much as it did in the Industrial Era. That is, lower class voters prefer more egalitarian or liberal economic policies. However, lower class status predicts inegalitarian/conservative preferences on “second dimension” issues or what we call the “cultural/minority” policy dimension in the article. And this policy dimension has become much more important in recent decades.
While the claim that class influences public opinion on economic policy is probably well-understood, the idea that there is a relationship between class and second dimension social issues might be less familiar. We suggest that class is connected to culture and minority rights issues as a result of distinct worldviews that develop within different class positions.
Take, for examples, education, income, and occupation, factors that are often considered key components of class. Higher levels of education can influence how people understand the historical struggle for equal rights among various minority groups, for instance. A higher income grants greater access to life experiences that can shape how individuals view different cultures. Different occupations expose people to a mix of power hierarchies and social groups that can influence how these groups and the dynamics among them are understood.
The result is that a person’s class position can shape how they view and make sense of the world, which in turn helps them form opinions on issues like race, abortion, and LGBTQ rights.
Because the Democratic Party is willing to use government to pursue egalitarian or liberal outcomes on both the economic and culture dimensions, and the opposite is true for the Republican Party, liberal policy attitudes on either dimension predict support for the Democratic Party.
However, lower class voters often have liberal economic but conservative minority/cultural policy preferences, while the opposite is true for upper class voters, meaning they are both often conflicted. How do voters navigate these conflicts when choosing which party to support at the ballot box? We argue that the salience that voters attach to these different policy dimensions helps determine how they vote, and thus indirectly determines how class shapes voting.
We test these arguments using both American National Election Studies (ANES) and General Social Survey (GSS) data from the 1970s to 2018. First, using education, income, occupation and subjective class identity as different measures of class, we observed that there is an inconsistent relationship between class status and voting for the Democratic candidate for president over time, as can be seen in the figure below.
This figure shows the marginal effect of an increase in class status on the probability of voting for the Democratic candidate over time. In the top two panels we see the difference between upper class and upper middle class people and working class people using an occupation-based measure. The middle panel shows the effect of a one-unit increase in subjective class (which could take the value of lower, working, middle and upper). The bottom two panels show the effects of one-unit changes in ordinal measures of income and education.
We see that, for the most part, class is not significantly associated with voting for the Democratic candidate, since the point estimates are often very close to zero and the confidence intervals almost always overlap the zero line (the dashed line).
In some years, we see significant effects, in other years we do not, and in some years, we can see that higher class status (e.g. for education and income in 2016) is associated with a greater likelihood of voting Democratic. The only exception to this is that in the GSS data an increase in income is consistently associated with a lower probability of voting Democratic. But in most years, for most measures of class, it is not a significant determinant of Democratic voting since the 1970s.
However, we find that class consistently predicts liberal or egalitarian economic and social/cultural policy attitudes. In the figure below we see the relationship between class and whether people think the government should reduce inequality and guarantee jobs. In each case, we see that increasing class status is associated with more conservative policy attitudes (a lower likelihood of thinking the government should do these things), and that these associations are consistently significant.
Next, we examined how class was associated with social/cultural policy attitudes using an index of survey items about abortion and LGBTQ rights. Here, we see that increasing class status predicts more liberal policy attitudes. Higher class groups are consistently significantly more supportive of abortion and LGBTQ rights.
These conflicting attitudes on different policy dimensions can explain why class consistently predicts policy attitudes, but inconsistently predicts voting. How, then, does class translate into voting, if at all?
We think that people who think abortion, LGBTQ rights, etc. are more important will vote based on their views on that dimension, while those that think economic issues are more important will vote based on their views on that dimension. To measure the importance of “salience” that people attach to these different policy dimensions we examined the open-ended ANES questions for mentions of either economic or social/cultural policies when not prompted by the interviewer or survey instrument.
We then examined whether there was a stronger relationship between policy attitudes on a policy dimension and vote choice for people that place salience on a given issue, and we find that there is. For example, someone with liberal economic or cultural policy attitudes and who finds that policy type salient, is more likely to vote Democratic, while someone with more conservative culture policy attitudes who finds that policy salient is more likely to vote Republican. The figure below shows that someone with liberal culture policy attitudes who also finds that issue salient is about 1.5 percentage points more likely to vote Democratic. Someone with more liberal economic policy attitudes who finds that issue salient is about .5 percentage points more likely to vote Democratic. While these differences are not huge, given the closeness of recent presidential elections, they can certainly be meaningful.
Our results show that class remains very relevant to political and policy attitudes in the U.S., albeit in a more complex manner than during the Industrial Era. This is largely due to the emergence of second dimension issues, like abortion and gay marriage. Unlike in the Industrial Era, people’s class leads them to have policy attitudes that, in part, conflict with the stances of the major parties. They navigate these conflicts by considering the salience of different issues.
