 Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages in 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020Amory Gethin,
Clara Martínez-Toledano () and
Thomas Piketty
PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) from HAL 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: 2022-02 Published in Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2022, 137 (1), pp.1-48. ⟨10.1093/qje/qjab036⟩ There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it. Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:pseptp:halshs-03672669 DOI: 10.1093/qje/qjab036 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in PSE-Ecole d'économie de Paris (Postprint) from HAL |
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