POLITICAL SCIENCE

Class Voting is Dead

Class Voting is Dead

Introduction

Twentieth century has seen extended debates over the significance of social classes in a society as basis for partisanship in politics. In today's politics class has become an irrelevant and outdated concept which is found more in folk recollections than a currently important phenomenon. Arguments of various scholars and researches now assert that class inequality in today's time has lost its political significance. I am not saying that it has been completely eliminated but wherever it still survives it has been reconstructed and redefined to include gender, race and other new political subjects rather than economic conflicts especially resource distribution conflicts that arise from classed based segregation of interests (Evans, n.d, p.1) . Voting behaviour can be defined as the way in which citizens of a country or community tend to vote. This voting behaviour is subjective to a number of diverse factors which are: age, background, geography, media and social class. Since our particular focus is on class voting, all the other factors are kept aside and class voting is discussed in detail.

The argument that I have developed after doing research on this topic is presented in this paragraph. Of all the research that I read to analyze the topic suggested that class voting is not dead. It is not completely finished but it has declined significantly over the years. This topic has been widely researched on and documented under the contemporary electoral research. One such famous argument was the Alford index which was used to measure the extent of class dealignment (class dealignment is the change is number of people voting according to their class). The first attempts to measure such decline made use of the Alford index. In case of Britain the Alford index or Labour party was the number of people belonging to working class and voting for Labour minus the number of people in the middle class voting for Labour party and same was with the Conservative party. Towards the end of 19th century we see a lot of focus of electorates shifting from class voting to non class voting. So in my view class voting is not dead but it is dying a slow death. The discussion section will support my argument for this purpose.

Discussion

Roots of Class Voting

For the purpose of analysis I have discussed some very popular ideas about the class voting in early ages. Studies in this field were able to identify the pattern in which lower class people were categorized as more prone to vote for the left wing political parties as compared to those in the higher classes and the upper class of voters supported right wing parties more than the lower classes. Some studies even mentioned the cross national differences in class voting behaviour. These studies basically segregated the class and voting behaviour into three generations (Nieuwbeerta, 1996, p.348).

First generation of research began by asking the primary question that whether or not a relationship existed between a person's economic and ...