Class, Policy Attitudes, and U.S. Presidential Voting in the Post-Industrial Era: The Importance of Issue Salience

• Published date: 01 June 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10659129221120226
• Author: William W. Franko,Christopher Witko
• Date: 01 June 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Political Research Quarterly

2023, Vol. 76(2) 882–898

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/10659129221120226

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Class, Policy Attitudes, and U.S.

Presidential Voting in the Post-Industrial

Era: The Importance of Issue Salience

William W. Franko

1

and Christopher Witko

2

Abstract

In the Post-industrial Era, there has been an apparent weakening of the relationship between class and voting in the U.S.,

with lower class voters becoming less likely to support the Democratic Party. We argue that this ref‌lects that lower class

status predicts liberal economic attitudes, but conservative views on cultural and racial issues, while the parti es are

consistently liberal or conservative, creating conf‌licts for many voters. How do voters settle such internal conf‌licts? We

argue that the salience that voters attach to these different types of issues determines how policy attitudes, and indirectly

class, shapes voting. Using ANES and GSS data since the 1970s, we f‌ind that class consistently predicts economic and

cultural/minority policy attitudes, and that lower class voters who place more salience on economic issues, and upper

class voters for whom cultural issues are more salient, are more likely to support the Democratic Party in presidential

elections.

Keywords

class, redistribution, voting, public opinion, political behavior

Introduction

During the Industrial Era in the West lower class indi-

viduals generally supported egalitarian economic policies

and left parties, while upper class individuals typically

preferred less redistribution and conservative parties

(Korpi 1980).

1

As deindustrialization has occurred

working class voters have become less likely to support

left and center-left parties, such as the Democratic Party in

the U.S. (Carnes and Lupu 2020;Evans and Tilley 2012).

Has class become irrelevant to policy attitudes and voting

in the U.S.?

Understanding whether and how class remains relevant

for these outcomes is important. Many scholars argue that

class receded in importance as industrial class groups

declined as material facts (Clark and Lipset 1991;

Pakulski and Waters 1996), and post-material issues be-

come more prominent (Berry et al. 1998). Though de-

industrialization has disrupted economic categories, and

cultural and minority rights issues feature more promi-

nently, the U.S.’growing economic inequality (Franko

and Witko 2017) and stagnant social mobility (Chetty

et al. 2014) lead us to believe that class remains important

for policy attitudes, and even voting, albeit in a more

complicated manner than during the Industrial Era.

Specif‌ically, we argue that class predicts egalitarian/

liberal or inegalitarian/conservative policy attitudes on

both economic and what we call the “cultural/minority”

policy dimension. Because the Democratic Party is willing to

use government to pursue egalitarian or liberal outcomes on

both dimensions and the opposite is true for the Republican

Party, liberal policy attitudes on either dimension predict

support for the Democratic party. However, lower class

voters often have liberal economic but conservative

minority/cultural policy preferences, while the opposite is

true for upper class voters, meaning they are often conf‌licted.

How do voters negotiate these conf‌licts? We argue that the

salience that voters attach to these different policy

1

Department of Political Science, West Virginia University, Morgantown,

WV, USA

2

School of Public Policy, Pennsylvania State University, University Park,

PA, USA

Corresponding Author:

William W. Franko, Department of Political Science, 316 Woodburn

Hall, West Virginia University, P.O. Box 6317, Morgantown WV 26506-

6317, USA.

Email: william.franko@mail.wvu.edu

dimensions helps determine how they vote, and thus indi-

rectly determines how class shapes voting.

Using both American National Election Studies

(ANES) and General Social Survey (GSS) data from the

1970s to 2018, we f‌ind support for these arguments.

Specif‌ically, class consistently predicts egalitarian/liberal

or inegalitarian/conservative attitudes toward redistribu-

tion and minority/cultural policy, which in turn consis-

tently predict Democratic presidential voting. Due to

frequent conf‌lict in attitudes on these two dimensions,

class is only weakly associated with voting, but egalitarian

economic policy preferences more strongly predict sup-

port for Democratic voting when economic issues are

more salient to individual voters. The same is true of

cultural policy attitudes. These f‌indings can explain how

class still remains very important for policy attitudes and

for understanding U.S. mass politics, but is nevertheless

only weakly related to voting patterns in many elections.

The Continuing Relevance of Class for Policy

Attitudes and Voting

For a variety of reasons, class has never been as central to

politics in the U.S. as it in other Western democracies, but

class politics in a muted form emerged by the 1930s

(Witko 2017). During the New Deal to Great Society eras,

the U.S. demonstrated the typical Industrial Era cleavage

found in Western democracies –lower class individuals

disproportionately supported the left-leaning Democratic

Party and upper class voters disproportionately supported

Republican candidates (Brewer and Stonecash 2006;

Brooks and Manza 1997;Stonecash et al. 2000;Witko

2016).

Western nations have shifted from industrial to post-

industrial economies in recent decades (Iversen and

Cusack 2000). These economic changes reduced the

size of industrial class groups, created new economic

groups (Clark and Lipset 1991;Kitschelt and Rehm 2019)

and coincided with a change in the policy agenda from a

focus on redistribution and material issues to a greater

emphasis on self-expression, lifestyle issues, that is,

“post-material issues.”(Evans and Tilley 2012;Inglehart

2008;Jones, Theriault and Whyman 2019). The Demo-

cratic Party has focused more on post-material issues in

recent decades (Berry 1999), and the Republican Party has

increasingly embraced “culture war”and racial/ethnic

wedge issues (Hacker and Pierson 2020). What do

these changes mean for how class shapes policy attitudes

and voting?

Though traditional industrial class groups have de-

clined, it is clear that an economic hierarchy remains in the

United States, arguably even strengthening in some ways

(Chetty et al. 2014;Franko and Witko 2017). It would thus

be surprising if class were not still relevant for

redistributive policy attitudes. Indeed, a number of recent

studies show that lower class voters are more supportive

of taxing, spending and other programs to equalize

economic opportunity and outcomes in the U.S. (Bartels

2008;Boudreau and MacKenzie 2018;Franko, Tolbert

and Witko 2013;Gilens 2012;McCall and Manza 2001;

Piston 2018).

However, in the Post-Industrial Era, we must also

consider cultural and minority rights policies (Spies

2013). Initially, it may seem that class would not be

relevantto,say,LGBTQrights.However,research

shows that upper class Americans are more likely to have

liberal social policy attitudes (Gelman and Cortina

2008). Class-based differences in f‌inancial resources,

higher education, and workplace environments can de-

velop into different worldviews (Bourdieu and

Richardson 1986;De Keere 2018). Kitschelt and

Rehm (2019) have a great discussion of education as

a driver of attitudes on these types of issues and edu-

cation is a key component of many measures of class

(Carnes and Lupu 2020). Stubager (2010) shows that the

highly educated are more tolerant of outgroups and have

more libertarian social preferences than others, perhaps

because highly educated people are more likely to be

familiar with the historical oppression that many mi-

nority groups have suffered.

Other aspects of class may also affect attitudes. For

instance, if resistance to equality for different groups

results from economic precarity lower income individuals

will be less tolerant (Dancygier and Donnelly 2013).

Occupation can also shape attitudes due to different ex-

periences with hierarchy and messages about gender

equality (Kohn and Schooler 1969;Sayman 2007). Pro-

fessionals, managers, and investors may also be more

aware of the ways that discriminatory policies actually

have the potential to threaten their investments (Grose and

Peterson 2020).

Though there are certainly other ways to describe these

“second dimension”attitudes (Kitschelt and Rehm 2019;

Stubager 2010), for simplicity, we refer to egalitarian

cultural and minority rights attitudes as liberal and ine-

galitarian attitudes as conservative. We prefer not to use

the term post-material because these matters have critical

material implications. We do not use the term libertarian

because many people who have liberal attitudes on these

dimensions want the government to take active steps to

reduce inequities.

Of course, not all upper or lower class individuals share

the same policy preferences. Gelman and Cortina (2008)

show that upper income people in conservative states have

more conservative attitudes on social issues than upper

income people in liberal states. Yet, they also show that in

all states the wealthy have more liberal social policy at-

titudes than the poor and the wealthy have more

Franko and Witko 883