Fernández, Juan J. et al  <br/><br/>
The socio-structural basis of the long term decline in traditional left-right class voting in affluent democracies, 1964‐2019 

 - Comparative Politics  
 - 57(4), Jul, 2025: p.483-504 
<br/><br/> 1960s? The causes of this decline are far from being fully understood. We hypothesize that the decline in this cleavage between the working class and other classes is connected to the shrinkage of the working class, increases in economic prosperity, and a reduction in levels of inequality. To test these hypotheses, we use a newly-assembled dataset including sixteen advanced democracies with a long temporal coverage (1964‐2019) and a class voting index based on the difference between the proportion of a particular social class in a party’s electorate and the proportion of this social class in the electorate as a whole. Models using country fixed effects confirm a decline in the class-based voting cleavage across Western democracies. Controlling for several political variables, the size of the working class constitutes the best predictor of declines in class voting in affluent democracies.- Reproduced <br/><br/><br/><br/>https://www.ingentaconnect.com/contentone/cuny/cp/2025/00000057/00000004/art00004<br/> 
<br/><br/><label>Subjects--Topical Terms: </label><br/>Class cleavage, Left-wing political parties, Political behavior, Voting, Working class, Working class size.