Class, Social Mobility, and Voting in Democratizing and Industrializing England

Torun Dewan, Christopher Kam, Jaakko Meriläinen () and Janne Tukiainen
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Torun Dewan: Department of Government, London School of Economics and Political Science
Christopher Kam: Department of Political Science, University of British Columbia
Jaakko Meriläinen: Department of Economics, Stockholm School of Economics
Janne Tukiainen: Department of Economics, University of Turku

No 179, Discussion Papers from Aboa Centre for Economics

Abstract: To what extent did class shape political behavior during early democratization and industrialization, and did class voting reflect economic interests or durable political identities? We use newly collected individual-level panel data from open-ballot elections in the nineteenth-century England—around 130,000 recorded vote choices linked to voters’ occupations across elections—to provide evidence on the class-basis of voting. Voting was strongly structured by occupation: skilled workers and the petite bourgeoisie disproportionately supported Liberals and their free-trade agenda, while the gentry, farm workers, and unskilled workers leaned Conservative. Exploiting within-voter mobility, we show that these alignments reflected durable political identities rather than contemporaneous economic interests: Although socially mobile voters resemble their destination class in cross-sectional comparisons, within-voter estimates show that individuals did not systematically change their vote choice when their class changed. Class-based political alignments were thus behaviorally durable at the individual level, even though the Industrial Revolution profoundly transformed society.

Keywords: Class-based voting; economic voting; poll books; socialization; social mobility; voting behavior (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 N33 N93 P00 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 85
Date: 2026-03
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