We now turn to the question of where voters who abandoned the mainstream Left have gone or, more precisely, where they went at the time they abandoned the mainstream Left. As this analysis is restricted to “leavers,” i.e., to survey respondents who say that they voted for the mainstream Left in the previous election and did not vote for the mainstream Left in the current election, the total number of observations is much smaller than in our analysis of the choice to abandon (or stay with) the mainstream Left.
We consider each of following options available to voters who abandon the mainstream Left: (1) non-voting, (2) vote for a Center-Right party, (3) vote for a Green
party, (4) vote for a radical Left party or (5) vote for a radical Right party. Pooling all 40 elections at our disposal, the distribution of choices by the 3,889 respondents who abandoned the mainstream Left is as follows: 45% voted for a Center-Right party, 16%
voted for the radical Left, 16% abstained from voting, 15% voted for the Greens and 8%
voted for the radical Right. The small number of leavers who turned to the radical Right comes as something of a surprise, but other studies (e.g., Evans and Mellon 2016) show that radical Right parties primarily draw voters from the Center-Right and that mainstream-Left leavers who end up voting for the radical Right commonly transition through the Center-Right. It should also be noted, again, that our dataset does not include very recent elections (in which radical Right parties have done well and have perhaps become more direct competitors of the mainstream Left).
As in the analysis of abandonment of the mainstream Left, we are interested in how class and union membership and the interaction between them shape the electoral behavior of individuals. Przeworski and Sprague’s core argument is that supra-class strategies appeal to voters as individual citizens and thus turn workers into issue-oriented voters without strong partisan attachments (e.g., Przeworski and Sprague 1986, 51). The implication would seem to be that workers who abandon the mainstream Left might go anywhere and should not be expected to behave differently from non-workers. At the same time, however, Przeworski and Sprague (1986, 79) suggest that the existence of rival parties that appeal to workers on the basis of class or some other “particularistic”
identity renders the mainstream Left more vulnerable when it adopts supra-class strategies.
Going beyond Paper Stones, there can be little doubt that working-class households have fared badly by comparison to middle-class households in terms of income growth and economic insecurity since the 1990s. Globalization in general and immigration in particular threaten the economic status of workers to a far greater extent than they threaten the economic status of middle-class professionals. Meanwhile, it seems to be generally true that the policy platforms on which mainstream Left parties have campaigned in elections (and implemented in government) have prioritized fiscal consolidation, at the expense of redistributive social spending, and structural reforms designed to promote labor-market flexibility, supplemented by “social investment.”19 Against this background, it seems reasonable to suppose that workers who abandon the mainstream Left do so with other options in mind than their middle-class counterparts.
More specifically, we hypothesize that, relative to middle-class leavers, workers who abandon the mainstream Left are more likely to abstain from voting and more likely to vote for “anti-establishment parties” of the radical Left or the radical Right.20
We expect union membership to condition the effects of class. Many studies show that union members are more likely to vote and there is at least some evidence to suggest that the association between union membership and electoral participation is strongest for citizens with low socio-economic status (e.g., Kerrissey and Schofer 2013;
Rosenfeld 2014). Other studies have shown that union membership is associated with support for redistribution (Mosimann and Pontusson 2017) and with support for immigration (Donnelly 2016). Drawing on these studies, we propose three additional hypotheses: (1) union membership reduces the propensity of workers who abandon the mainstream Left to abstain from voting; (2) union membership reduces the propensity of
workers who abandon the mainstream Left to vote for the radical Right; and (3) union membership increases the propensity of workers and non-workers to abandon the mainstream Left in favor of other Left parties.
For each of the five options identified above, we again estimate hierarchical logistic regression models, with country-elections as the level-2 units. The dependent variable in each of the models is dichotomous: choosing the option or not. The models include the individual-level control variables identified earlier. As the class profile of the mainstream Left party is no longer relevant, we do not include any macro variables in this analysis, but we do include country dummies and in estimating the models designed to predict voting for Greens, radical Left and radical Right, we drop elections in which such parties were not meaningful options.21
Sticking with three classes (workers, socio-cultural professionals and other non-workers) throughout the analyses, we begin by estimating models that do not interact class and union membership and then estimate models with interaction terms added.
Reported in Appendix 8 the first set of models are less vulnerable to the small-N problem and, in any case, provide the most appropriate tests of our baseline hypotheses concerning differences between workers and non-workers who abandon the mainstream Left. Figure 5 summarizes the results for social class graphically. Relative to “other non-workers,” workers who abandon the mainstream Left are more likely to abstain and to vote for the radical Right while they are less likely to vote for Greens and Center-Right parties. Against the same benchmark, socio-cultural professionals are less likely to vote for Center-Right parties and more likely to vote for Green parties.
[Figure 5]
Again, the effects of class displayed in Figure 5 derive from models that control for union membership, along with other individual-level characteristics. As shown in Table 7, the direct effects of union membership are straightforward and, with one exception, consistent with our expectations. Controlling for social class, union members who abandon the mainstream Left are less likely to stop voting and less likely to vote for the Center-Right. Simply put, union members who abandon mainstream Left parties are more likely to remain on the Left, broadly conceived, than leavers who are not union members. Note, however, that these results do not bear our expectation concerning the radical Right: union members who abandon the mainstream Left are as likely to vote for the radical Right as non-union members.
[Table 7]
Turning to the results of estimating interaction models, Table 8 presents the marginal effects of union membership on choosing one of the five options conditional on respondents’ social class. Among workers who abandon the mainstream Left, union membership is associated with continued voting and with voting for radical Left parties.
Again, contrary to our expectations, unionized workers are not less likely to abandon the mainstream Left for the radical Right than non-union workers. Among social-cultural professionals, union membership moves Left-party leavers away from the radical Right as well as the Center-Right, towards Greens and, most strongly, towards radical Left parties. Among other non-workers who abandon the mainstream Left, finally, union membership is also associated with a higher probability of voting for the radical Left and a lower probability of voting for the Center-Right.
[Table 8]
6. Conclusion
Our analyses of CSES data for 2001-15 show that class remains an important feature of electoral behavior in liberal democracies and, more specifically, that the trade-off between working-class and middle-class support posited by Przeworski and Sprague (1986) continues to haunt Left parties. As suggested by the authors of Paper Stones, unionization of workers mitigates the electoral dilemma of the mainstream Left, but our results indicate that unionization of white-collar professionals and other middle-class strata does not have this effect. Middle-class voters who are unionized are more likely to vote for mainstream Left parties, as well as other Left parties, than middle-class voters who are not unionized, but they, too, become more likely to abandon Left parties when these parties target working-class voters in their mobilizational efforts. While unionization keeps middle-class voters on the Left, it may actually reinforce—rather than mitigate—the trade-off between working-class and middle-class support for mainstream Left parties.
In short, union decline represents an electoral problem for Left parties and this problem assumes particular importance to the extent that union decline is concentrated among production and service workers. Good data on unionization rates by occupation are hard to come by, but for countries with separate blue-collar and white-collar unions, notably Sweden, we know that it is primarily blue-collar unions that have declined over the last 20-30 years (see Mosimann and Pontusson 2018). More broadly, available data indicate that unionization has held up much better in the public sector than in the private
sector (Pontusson 2013) and that de-unionization has been most pronounced in the lower half of the earnings distribution (Becher and Pontusson 2011, Mosimann and Pontusson 2017).
An obvious limitation of the preceding analysis is that it does not take into account party platforms or the policies that mainstream Left parties have pursued in government. Following Przeworski and Sprague, we have simply assumed that the class composition of new voters tells us something meaningful about strategic choices that parties make. As a first, admittedly very crude, attempt to address the question of what parties do (or might do) to mobilize workers, Table 9 presents the results of regressing our measure of class profile, i.e., the relative representation of workers among new voters, on two features of party platforms captured by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP): the overall Right-Left position of manifestos (“rile”) and the percentage of positive mentions of labor and labor groups in manifestos (“per 701”). With a sample consisting of 37 elections out of the 40 elections in our dataset,22 we find no association whatsoever between the overall Left-Right position of the platform and the extent to which mainstream Left parties mobilize workers in any given election, but we do find a positive and statistically significant association between the extent to which parties make positive references to “labor” and the extent to which they mobilize workers in particular.
The latter association remains when we include a dummy to control for the absence of radical competitors on either the Left or the Right.23 In light of the small number of observations and obvious endogeneity concerns, these results are, at best, suggestive.
The main take-away is perhaps that being more “leftist” does not appear to be the universal formula for mobilizing working-class voters. This finding dovetails with our
previous finding that unionized middle-class voters, especially socio-cultural professionals, often switch to radical Left parties when mainstream Left parties mobilize workers.
[Table 9]
The results presented in Table 9 also suggest that mainstream Left parties are more able to mobilize new working-class support when they do not face radical Left and radical Right competitors. This raises another question that we want to pursue in future work. In the analysis of electoral trade-offs presented above, we control for the vote shares of Green, radical Left and radical Right parties in the previous election, but we do not interact these macro variables with respondents’ class positions (and the effects of the control variables are rarely significant). In light of our analysis of where Left-party leavers have gone, it seems plausible to suppose that the presence of radical options, especially radical Right options, increases the propensity of working-class voters to abandon the mainstream Left more than it increases the propensity of middle-class voters to abandon the mainstream Left.
Two further limitations of what we have accomplished in this paper deserve to be noted. It goes without saying that the results presented above are based on generalizing across countries and over time. To address the question of whether or not electoral trade-offs have become more severe for mainstream Left parties, it would be worthwhile to replicate the macro-level analysis in Paper Stones with more recent data, but also to analyze surveys for individual countries going back to the 1960s. Less obviously perhaps, the preceding analyses assume that “union membership” has similar implications across countries and individuals. We have not taken into account that some
unions are more closely affiliated with mainstream Left parties than others (see Arndt and Rennwald 2016) and that some are more solidaristic than others (Mosimann and Pontusson 2017). There are significant data constraints, but also exciting research opportunities in this domain.
While further nuance surely needs to be added, the core message of this paper boils down to the following proposition: for self-interested reasons, mainstream Left parties should worry about the decline of working-class organization and ought to make of an effort to reverse this process. As many scholarly studies have shown, de-unionization is not an inevitable result of structural changes in advanced capitalist economies.24 To mention only a few examples, political decisions pertaining to the regulation of temporary employment contracts, outsourcing of public services and the administration of unemployment insurance have important consequences for working-class organization. And working-working-class organization in turn has important electoral consequences.
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Table 1: The vote share of mainstream Left parties
See text for explanation. * = change from peak+1 (rather than 1990s). Source: Armingeon et al (2016), supplemented by data from Wikipedia (for recent elections).
election years average vote share change since 1990s
post-1960
Table 2: Correlates of change in the vote share of mainstream Left parties since the 1990s (OLS regression).
P-values in parentheses: bold = p < .05. See text for explanation (and note 9 on robustness to alternative of control variables).
(1) (2) (3) (4)
Δ union density .039 .273 .116 .458
(.851) (.297) (.525) (.033)
no radical competitor 9.144 12.838
(.152) (.014)
crisis+incumbency -9.607 -11.426
(.016) (.002)
constant -9.874 -10.518 -6.569 -4.656
(.006) (.013) (.026) (.066)
Observations 19 19 19 19
Adj R-square -.057 -.030 .584 .454
Table 3: The class composition of electorates (averages for available election surveys 2001-15).
Source: Own estimates based on CSES data.
production and service workers
socio-cultural professionals
other non-workers
Australia 23% 22% 55%
Austria 37 16 47
Denmark 37 21 42
Finland 43 16 41
France 41 16 43
Germany 37 16 47
Greece 27 14 59
Iceland 38 14 48
Ireland 39 14 47
Netherlands 30 20 50
New Zealand 29 18 53
Norway 32 20 48
Spain 41 7 52
Sweden 41 25 34
Switzerland 22 20 58
UK 38 14 48
Average 33 17 50
Table 4: Unionization by social class, averages for available election surveys
Table 4: Unionization by social class, averages for available election surveys