Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020

Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano and Thomas Piketty

The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2022, vol. 137, issue 1, 1-48

Abstract: This article sheds new light on the long-run evolution of political cleavages in 21 Western democracies. We exploit a new database on the socioeconomic determinants of the vote, covering more than 300 elections held between 1948 and 2020. In the 1950s and 1960s, the vote for social democratic, socialist, and affiliated parties was associated with lower-educated and low-income voters. It has gradually become associated with higher-educated voters, giving rise in the 2010s to a disconnection between the effects of income and education on the vote: higher-educated voters now vote for the “left,” while high-income voters continue to vote for the “right.” This transition has been accelerated by the rise of green and anti-immigration movements, whose distinctive feature is to concentrate the votes of the higher-educated and lower-educated electorates. Combining our database with historical data on political parties’ programs, we provide evidence that the reversal of the education cleavage is strongly linked to the emergence of a new “sociocultural” axis of political conflict.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/qje/qjab036 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020 (2022)
Working Paper: Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020 (2022)
Working Paper: Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948-2020 (2021)
Working Paper: Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948-2020 (2021)
Working Paper: Brahmin Left versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948-2020 (2021)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:qjecon:v:137:y:2022:i:1:p:1-48.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

The Quarterly Journal of Economics is currently edited by Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan Nunn, Andrei Shleifer and Stefanie Stantcheva

More articles in The Quarterly Journal of Economics from President and Fellows of Harvard College
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().