For many years, there has been an intense debate over the importance of social class as a basis of political partisanship and ideological divisions in advanced industrial societies. The arguments of postmodernists and disillusioned socialists have been combined with those of numerous empirical researchers on both sides of the Atlantic—and in both sociology and political science—who have claimed that class inequality has lost its political importance. Yet at the same time, the class politics proselytizers—whether Marxist or otherwise—have remained unpersuaded. This book presents a state‐of‐the‐ ... More

For many years, there has been an intense debate over the importance of social class as a basis of political partisanship and ideological divisions in advanced industrial societies. The arguments of postmodernists and disillusioned socialists have been combined with those of numerous empirical researchers on both sides of the Atlantic—and in both sociology and political science—who have claimed that class inequality has lost its political importance. Yet at the same time, the class politics proselytizers—whether Marxist or otherwise—have remained unpersuaded. This book presents a state‐of‐the‐art analysis of the changing nature of class voting and the salience of class politics in advanced industrial societies. It combines broad ranging cross‐national comparison with detailed country studies and empirical tests of key theoretical and methodological explanations of changing levels of class voting. The final section includes commentaries from distinguished scholars from the fields of social stratification, political science, and political sociology, followed by a general discussion.