Cleavages, ideology and party choice: a cross-national and longitudinal analysis

Ever since the classic work by Lipset & Rokkan (1967) socio-structural characteristics have been routinely considered as predictors of party choice. More recently, however, research has shown that the predictive power of social cleavages, as captured by socio-structural variables, is declining (Franklin et al. 1990, Knutsen 2004). As a consequence, much recent work has focused on value or ideological orientations in order to explain party choice (van der Eijk et al. 2005). We revisit this argument and compare the predictive ability of an ideological (general Left-Right orientations) and a socio-structural (age, gender, occupation and religiosity) model of party choice. For our analysis we use multinomial regressions to compare the explanatory power of the two models as well as descriptive inference through non-parametric tools to identify general trends. Our annual longitudinal (mid 1970s-2010) data comes from four West European countries featuring different electoral/party systems: France, Germany, Britain and the Netherlands.