Explaining working class vote choices

In order to move on to the next set of hypotheses, I need to reduce my analysis to a subset of our original ESS data pool. Thus, I return to Oesch's class schema and use the ‘manual production workers’ and 'service workers' categories as a filter. All following analyses are therefore restricted to this group, that I equate to the broad working class (to see a study of similarities, check Ares 2017).

Thanks to the massive size of the dataset, sample sizes remain large and solid.

My dependent variables are once again soc, right, abs. I also reuse the basic controls from my previous logistic regression: gender, age, and whether the voter was born in her current country of

residence or not. I add a basic control for education attainment, another to check the preference for strong leaders to take authoritarianism sentiment into account (following the growing body of literature that points to it as a factor for vote choices, particularly among non-college voters, e.g. Choma and Hanoch 2017) as well as the key independent variables. Following my previously stated hypotheses, there are three sets of variables to test, all of them normalised into a 0-1 scale in order to obtain smoother, more readable results.

(1) Trust in political institutions (0=no trust; 1=full trust). As I do in the next chapter, I proceed by normalizing factor loadings of three ESS questions about how much respondents trust parties, politicians and the national parliament.

(2) Economic anxiety (0=low; 1=high). I introduce the answers to the ESS question “Which of the descriptions on this card comes closest to how you feel about your household's income nowadays?”.

The question has four possible answers: the respondent might be - living comfortably on present income (=0),

- coping on present income (=.33),

- finding it difficult on present income (=.66), or - finding it very difficult on present income (=1).

(3) Views on immigration (0=strongly for; 1=strongly against). Following Polavieja (2016), I factor and then cluster all immigration questions common to all ESS waves. These are:

a. Allow many/few immigrants of same race/ethnic group as majority, ranging from “allow many” to “allow none”.

b. Allow many/few immigrants of different race/ethnic group as majority, ranging from “allow many” to “allow none”.

c. Allow many/few immigrants from poorer countries outside Europe, ranging from “allow many” to “allow none”.

d. Immigration bad or good for the country’s economy, on a ten-point scale.

e. Cultural life of the country is undermined or enriched by immigration, in a ten-point scale.

f. Immigrants make country a better or worse place to live, on a ten-point scale.

As before, I run each one of the three models twice: once for the 2002-2008 period, and again for the 2010-2016 period. Putting both together gives a sense of the general trend and at the same time a sense of the effect of each factor of interest, as well as its change before and after the Great Recession. Before moving on, I should reiterate that my analysis is not actually capable to show shift of voters’ decisions, but rather aggregate trends over time.

Table A.6 in the Appendix displays the regressions’ results. However, I will limit my considerations in this section to marginal probabilities, which is a more intuitive and adequate way to test our hypotheses.

To begin with, it seems quite apparent from Figure 2.1 that mistrust in political institutions draws voters away from SDP and towards non-voting: The least trusting working class voters are substantially less likely to vote for them than the most trusting ones. Largely, these voters clearly move towards abstention.

Figure 2.1. Marginal probabilities - choosing among parties for working class voters depending on trust in political institutions (0: very low trust - 1: very high trust)

Full results on Table A.7, based on logistic regression model from Table A.6.

It is also remarkable not only that distrust is a driver towards the far-left and the far-right, as expected, but that the slope of the curve for both (and particularly for the SDP) is less steep after 2008, indicating that the effect has decreased, and has nearly disappeared for the far-right. It only retains a

strong power for non-voting. After the crisis, working class voters further duplicate their probability of abstaining if they hold a very low level of trust towards the country’s institutions.

The second factor considered is economic anxiety. First, it should be said that its effect for the far-right is essentially irrelevant according to Figure 2.2. Instead, its clearest effect goes for abstention: working class voters going through economic hardships move toward non-voting, especially after the crisis.

Figure 2.2. Marginal probabilities - choosing among parties for working class voters depending on income pressure (0: no pressure at all - 1: high pressures)

Full results on Table A.7, based on logistic regression models from Table A.6.

Non-voters are also driven by anti-immigration sentiment to a significant extent, but clearly the steepest effect corresponds to the working class move towards the far-right. The extent to which anti-immigration views affects it is striking, particularly after 2008, when it turns into a five-fold increase across the whole curve that becomes more intense as we consider more extreme positions.

Figure 2.3. Marginal probabilities of choosing among parties for working class voters depending on preferences regarding immigration (0: very much for - 1: very much against)

Full results on Table A.7, based on logistic regression models from Table A.6.

It is equally significant how pro-immigration views have increased its effect as a driver of SDP vote after 2008, highlighting the increased relevance for the political battle within the working class that this particular issue has acquired over the last decade and a half.