Class Dealignment
Class dealignment refers to a weakening of the traditional association between social class and political party allegiance. This phenomenon is characterized by a decline in the influence of class-based factors on voting behavior, leading to a more diverse and fragmented political landscape. As a result, individuals are less likely to vote along traditional class lines and are more inclined to support a range of different political parties.
3 Key excerpts on "Class Dealignment"
eBook - ePubCivil Society and Class Politics
Essays on the Political Sociology of Seymour Martin Lipset
- Irving Louis Horowitz(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Strong national parties weaken these dynamics in most countries outside the United States, however, pointing up the disparities between party leaders and citizens. Citizens in many European countries shifted toward post-industrial politics long before their party leaders. Many shifts in citizen policy preference consistently hold cross-nationally, but parties are nationally distinct, making them critical for implementing change. Death, Decline, Dealignment, and Realignment These four labels convey quite different meanings, but have been variously applied to the same results. The last is favored by some Oxford/Berkeley authors. Why? Realignment keeps class “alive.” How? The first three d-words—death, decline, or dealignment— imply a weakened relation between class and voting. Realignment implies not a weakening, but a new relationship or alignment between an occupational group and political party. A major example is professionals, an occupational category not distinguished by Goldthorpe in his class schema: he lumped them with managers as upper-class persons. But Hout et al. (inEvans 1999) and Weakliem and Heath (in Evans 1999) examined professionals separately, finding that unlike managers they “realigned” their voting from the 1950s to 1990s: from Republican to Democrat in the United States. Yet this did not occur in Britain (Weakliem and Heath 1999). “Realignment” is preferred by some Berkeley/Oxford writers since it can be interpreted as an adaptation of “class politics.” Realignment contrasts with death, decline, or dealignment since one can interpret some logistic regression results as showing “no decline.” How? Simply put, in a logistic regression model to explain party voting, the key variables considered by the Oxford/Berkeley participants are usually the impact of all of the occupational categories. This reading of the printout comes from looking narrowly at a statistical measure (like the bic in the Hout et al...
eBook - ePub- Gordon Marshall, Howard Newby, David Rose, Carol Vogler(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The conclusions drawn by proponents of the Class Dealignment thesis do not, in fact, follow from the data offered in support of this argument. Curiously enough, the discussion here almost exactly parallels that in earlier chapters on social mobility, since the crucial point of difference between proponents and opponents of Class Dealignment concerns the relationship between absolute and relative class voting. This distinction is analogous to that between absolute levels of social mobility and relative mobility chances. Measures of absolute trends and of relative chances are equally valid but, as we have seen, they are appropriate to testing different sorts of propositions. Our contention about the so-called decline of class politics is that this thesis requires evidence about relative class voting whereas its proponents have examined only absolute levels of class voting. Or, to put the matter another way, arguments about Class Dealignment are rather more complex than might at first appear to be the case. Before presenting the evidence from our own survey it is necessary to consider these complexities somewhat further. I Class seems to have mattered in British political life over the years because nothing much else has. Other lines of social cleavage likely to be reflected in voting behaviour—urban—rural, religious, or ethnic—cultural 3 —have proved to be of little importance in recent history (Northern Ireland is the only obvious exception) or have been absorbed into class politics itself. The connections between Britain’s class structure and its party politics are in fact both manifest and multiform. The Labour Party was created by trades unionists specifically to represent working-class interests. Although periodic attempts to broaden its electoral appeal have swelled the numbers of middle-class Labour voters and Members of Parliament it is still seen as predominantly a trade union and manual workers’ party...
eBook - ePub- Colin Crouch(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Polity(Publisher)
...A perceived decline in trustworthiness may well be merely the consequences of our knowing more about them than in the past, thanks to changing norms of transparency and greater media exposure. But these changing norms are themselves a response to declining levels of trust among citizens, itself in turn a result of a growing distance between them and political leaders. It is entirely possible that there was at least as much deception among politicians of earlier generations as now, but that the closer bonds they enjoyed with their voters prevented the latter from entertaining the possibility. As class and religion failed to deliver voters as in the past, parties began to look beyond their core constituencies to maximize their votes. Some rejected the very concept of a core, ostentatiously dissociating themselves from the declining constituencies of their past, seeking to become ‘catch-all’ parties. While this might broaden appeal, it is quite likely further to weaken the strength of a party’s ties. Fewer voters could say: ‘That is the party that is clearly for people like me (rather than for others).’ That process of loosening has been fundamental to post-democratic trends, leading politicians to relate to voters through mechanisms and techniques that resemble commercial advertising campaigns rather than engaging in exchanges with supporters. We see this change in the declining attraction to voters of the Christian democratic or conservative and social democratic parties that dominated the second half of the twentieth century in western Europe. Figure 6.1 compares the proportion of electorates voting for a country’s main centre-right party in parliamentary elections held around 1985 with the most recent elections by mid-2019. Figure 6.2 does the same for the main centre-left party...
