Does Class Matter? It Depends: Regional Variation in Class Voting, 1948-2000

• In Event: 1104 - Old Problems and New Methods: The Resurgence of Political Parties in Political Sociology

Abstract

The search for class politics in America has often focused on the post-Civil Rights era, with many scholars arguing that this period marked the beginning of the end for class: the increasing political salience of racial and religious cleavages seemed to displace the significance of class in structuring electoral outcomes. Existing evidence of this decline, however, takes an individualistic definition of class that ignores the crucial organizational and ecological factors that may create or dismantle class politics in different communities. This paper asks: how was class politics in late twentieth-century America reshaped in different communities? How was this process different in places with different types of community organizations, such as unions and churches? Using county-level voting and novel county-level unionization data from 1948-2000, along with ANES data from 1960-1996, I answer the questions of how and where class politics declined. i find that traditional class politics did deteriorate during this period, but it did so unevenly: evangelicasm kept the middle-class in the Republican fold but pushed the working-class out of the Democratic fold. High levels of unionization, meanwhile, became increasingly important in slowing a national trend toward the Republican Party even as unionization declined. Unions also had indirect effects on vote choice, as voters more likely to vote Democratic in unionized communities, regardless of their individual union status.

Author

• Stephanie Lynn Ternullo, University of Chicago