Political institutions and the social anchoring of the vote

“Cleavage-voting” – the extent to which voters’ membership in stable social groups leads them to choose parties that are politically aligned with those groups – seems to have experienced a significant decline in Western democracies, which has been generically linked to several consequences of social modernization. However, this emphasis on the search for general trends has left a blind-spot in the literature. Why do the constituencies of parties in some democracies turn out to be more socially heterogeneous than in others? Or to put differently, why is voting more deeply social anchored in some countries than in others? In order to answer that question, we start, first, by discussing problems in the measurement of cleavage-voting. Second, adopting a measure proposed by Huber (2011) and using data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems surveys, we test several hypotheses concerning how the social anchoring of vote in different political systems might be related to the incentives provided by political institutions, consequences of social modernization, and the timing of democratization. Prepared for presentation at the joint seminar of the Department of Economics and the Department of Political Science of Trinity College, Dublin, March 8, 2011