Voting Behavior between Class, Geography, and Structural Economic Changes

• In Event: Political Behavior, Geography and Socialization

Abstract

This chapter, part of our manuscript “Backlash and Realignment: Political Conflict in the XXI Century”, presents the main theoretical insights of our contribution. To introduce these theoretical insights, we take a step back from the more recent literature on the success of the populist radical right, on the decline of mainstream-left parties, and on the globalization backlash, drawing instead on longer-standing approaches in the materialist, economy-driven studies of voting behavior in democracies. Two main perspectives have animated political science research on the relationship between economic conditions and voting behavior in democracies over the past many decades: class politics and the economic vote. We recognize the value of these two toolboxes, which at the same time have shortcomings that we address constructively. The class politics literature tends to use, in our view, an overly static approach when conceptualizing and measuring class position. In particular, quite a bit of focus is devoted to the political consequences of being in a given position in a distribution (e.g., of income or skills) at a given point in time, rather than conceiving income and labor market trajectories as a major factor shaping life experiences, and consequently political behavior. In simpler words, when choosing how to vote, it might not matter just where a given voter is, but where they perceive to be going. Notice that this is not the same as “social mobility” as studied in sociology: we are not thinking about people moving to different locations in the income distribution or in social stratification, but about dynamics that lead to the collective decline of the standard of living and the labor market outcomes of a given social group. The economic vote literature, conversely, in our view has not assigned a sufficiently important role to the heterogeneity of experienced economic conditions, both in terms of position in social stratification and in terms of economic geography. In other words, the perception of whether the economy is “doing well” or not depends on who one is and, importantly, on where they live.

Two important insights on these themes emerge from the discussion. First, vulnerability to structural changes is a fundamental feature of the experience of individuals in terms of the economy. A definition of class that is useful to understand voting behavior, particularly in the current historical moment, needs to incorporate this vulnerability in its analysis. The second insight is that the political-economic geography dimension is key. Importantly, trajectories over time in an individual's income or labor market outcomes are affected in a substantial---and often inescapable---manner by place, and so are political stances and choices.

To explain how vulnerability to structural changes, as well as economic geography, can be incorporated in a general framework to understand voting behavior, we draw on an empirical innovation that we have introduced to study vulnerability to technological change, by which individual exposure depends on the occupational profiles an individual is predicted to have based on one’s demographic and human capital characteristics, and the occupational patterns prevailing in the labor market of their region of residence. This predicted exposure, we argue, better captures a “class-based” effect on political behavior than actual current occupational characteristics of the individual. We provide a more theoretical grounding to this approach, linking it to its precursors in the empirical work on occupational risk in Rehm (2009) and on the “personal unemployment rate” of Ansolabehere et al. (2014), but also making explicit its connection to classic ideas of class as related to collective destinies and objective conditions: ultimately, class has more to do with what is reserved to people like oneself than with where one currently is. At the same time, economic dynamics (i.e., prevailing economic conditions), albeit heterogeneous, are highly consequential for vote choice, as per the economic vote approach. Based on this discussion, we outline a coherent and internally consistent argument that links economic drivers and voting. We conclude the chapter by deriving and illustrating a set of empirical predictions for voting behavior in response to globalization and technological change.

Authors

• Italo Colantone, Bocconi University

• Piero Stanig, Bocconi University