Suchergebnisse

'The End Of Class Politics?' challenges the prevailing view that class is no longer important in politics. Drawing upon evidence from around the world, the book argues that we need to radically reconsider the political role of class in the modern world

To what extent are the social bases of political divisions in former communist societies consistent with those observed in Western democracies? This review critically examines theoretical and empirical work on social cleavages in East European, post-communist societies. It considers the initial wave of hypotheses concerning the structuring of party support in the region and examines empirical evidence on the patterning of the social bases of political preferences that have accrued subsequently, as well as the somewhat sparser attempts at explaining the processes through which these patterns emerge and change. It points to the omissions and weaknesses of the analyses so far conducted and concludes that the post-communist era has seen the emergence of social bases to politics that are like those in the West and that help shape variations in patterns of party competition in these societies.

This article uses new data from the 1997-2001 British Election Panel Study, the final wave of which was carried out immediately after the 2001 election, to examine the extent to which beliefs about the desirability of EMU & European integration more generally have become important as a source of voters' party preferences, both in absolute terms & relative to the importance of other more typically central concerns facing voters. In doing so, the article tells us something about the extent to which Labour's occupation of the middle ground on many economic & redistributive issues in 1997 & beyond has introduced a new era of British political competition, in which the economy & taxation, for example, are no longer so divisive & in which questions relating to attitudes towards emotive, national identity issues hold center stage. It considers, in other words, whether or not we have seen a potentially lasting realignment of the sort postulated in Evans & Norris's thesis that the 1997 election may have represented a 'critical' change in British politics. 7 Tables, 2 Figures, 1 Appendix, 23 References. Adapted from the source document.

Class voting is supposedly in severe decline in advanced industrial democracies. However, this conventional wisdom derives from research using problematic methods and measures and an overly simple model of political change. This chapter overviews past and current comparative research into changes in and explanations of class-based political behavior and argues for the continued significance of class voting and, by extension, class politics in contemporary democracies. I particularly emphasize the importance of using more appropriate methods and the application and testing of theories that integrate developments in this area with those in studies of voting behavior more generally. This translates into a need for the systematic testing of bottom-up/top-down interactions in the relations between social structure and political preferences and the precise specification and measurement of explanatory mechanisms that can account for the association between class position and voting.