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Abstract.  In this article, the impact of sector employment on party choice in eight West European countries is examined. The empirical analysis is organised into three parts. First, the impact of sector on party choice treated as a nominal‐level variable is analysed. Then the impact of sector within various social classes is focused upon, and finally sector employment is considered in relation to the division between socialist and non‐socialist parties. The impact of sector employment is large in Denmark; moderate in Britain, France and Italy; small in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands; and insignificant in Ireland. The impact of sector employment is much greater within the service class than any of the other social classes. The party families of the left, and also the greens, get stronger support from the public employees, while the main party families among the non‐socialist parties, apart from the Christian Democrats, get strongest support from private‐sector employees. Sector employment is most strongly correlated with socialist/non‐socialist party division in Denmark followed by France and Britain, with only minor or insignificant correlation in the other countries.

In this article, the impact of religious denomination on party choice is studied in eight western European countries from the early 1970s to the late 1990s. The research problems are (1) to examine the strength of the correlation between party choice and religious denomination over time, and (2) to analyze which political parties those who are affiliated and those who are unaffiliated to a religious community vote for, and how this has changed over time. The denominational cleavage varies considerably in strength in the eight countries. It is strongest in the Catholic and religiously mixed countries of Continental Europe. There is stability in the correlation between party choice and religious denomination in most countries. The main polarization involves, to a large degree, voters for parties on the left versus voters for parties on the right. It varies considerably, however, as to which parties on the left and the right have voters who contribute comparatively to polarization. Green parties are making inroads among the unaffiliated sections of the population. This changes the polarization caused by religious denomination in the sense that denominational differences become smaller for some other parties, first and foremost, the socialist and the communist parties.

This article studies the changing impact of social class, sector employment, and gender with regard to party choice in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, from the 1970s to the 1990s, using election survey data. Political parties in the three countries are grouped into four party groups: left socialist, social democratic, centrist, and rightist parties.Class voting has declined in all three countries. The focus on the four party groups shows that differences between the wage‐earner classes have declined for the social democratic and rightist party groups. By contrast, 'class voting' has increased for the left socialist parties, which increasingly have concentrated their support among the new middle class.Sector employment became an important party cleavage in all three countries in the 1990s. The impact of sector was generally largest in Denmark and Norway in the 1980s and 1990s. The sector cleavage also follows the left–right division of parties to a greater degree than previously. Sector differences in voting behaviour are most pronounced with regard to voting for the left socialist and the rightist parties.Gender differences in voting behaviour have increased and changed character in all three countries. In the 1970s, men supported the socialist parties to a greater extent than women; in the 1990s men supported the rightist parties to a greater extent than women in all three countries, whereas women supported the left socialist parties and (in Sweden) the Green Party to a greater degree than men. The effects of gender are generally reduced when sector employment is introduced into the multivariate analysis, indicating that the different sector employment of men and of women explains part of the gender gap in voting behaviour.

This article examines left-right party polarization among the mass publics in a longitudinal comparative perspective. The analysis comprises eight countries - Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy and the Netherlands - and trends are analysed from the early 1970s to the early 1990s. The strength of the relationship between party choice and left-right self-placement is analysed by three different measures: a standardized measure and two alternative unstandardized measures. The standardized measure produces a high degree of stability in the strength of the partisan component, while the unstandardized measures show that the partisan component has declined. The analysis shows that party voters locate themselves, quite consistently, more centrist. It is the changing left-right location of voters for the larger established parties in the party system that accounts for most of the change in the partisan component. The centrist tendency is particularly large for voters of the larger established parties in Belgium, France, Italy and the Netherlands.

This article takes Ronald Inglehart's and Hans-Dieter Klingemann's (1976) study regarding party and ideological components of left-right identification as a point of departure for a comparative analysis of the relationship between party choice, value orientations and left-right self-placement. The empirical analysis is based on eight and thirteen countries from 1981 and 1990, respectively. Party choice is still the dominant predictor of left-right self-placement although its dominance is not as large as was shown in Inglehart and Klingemann's analysis. However, if value orientations are considered prior to party choice in a causal sense, value orientations have a larger impact than party choice in most countries. Fragmentation of the party system and the division between advanced and less advanced societies are used to explain the cross-national variations. When the explained variance in the left-right scale is decomposed into unique components explained by party choice and value orientations and a compounded component, a strong compounded component is characteristic in advanced societies, while a strong partisan component is found in less advanced societies and in less fragmented party systems.