Brahmin left versus merchant right: changing political cleavages in 21 Western democracies, 1948-2020
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Published version
Author(s)
Gethin, Amory
Martinez-Toledano, Clara
Piketty, Thomas
Type
Journal Article
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 over 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 Issued
2022-02
Date Acceptance
2021-09-16
Citation
The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2022, 137 (1), pp.1-48
ISSN
0033-5533
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press
Start Page
1
End Page
48
Journal / Book Title
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
Volume
137
Issue
1
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of President and Fellows of Harvard College. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
License URL
Identifier
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014
Subjects
Economics
14 Economics
Publication Status
Published
Date Publish Online
2021-10-07