Political choice matters : explaining the strength of class and religious cleavages in cross-national perspective / edited by Geoffrey Evans and Nan Dirk De Graaf.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [407]-436) and index.

Explaining cleavage strength : the role of party positions / Geoffrey Evans and Nan Dirk De Graaf -- Measuring party positions / Ryan Bakker and Sara B. Hobolt -- Class voting and left-right party positions : a comparative study of fifteen Western democracies, 1960-2005 / Giedo Jansen, Geoffrey Evans and Nan Dirk De Graaf -- Ideological convergence and the decline of class voting in Britain / Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley -- The United States : still the politics of diversity / David L. Weakliem -- Accounting for the declining impact of class on the vote in Australia / Gary N. Marks -- The class-party relationship in Canada, 1965-2004 / Robert Andersen -- Enduring divisions and new dimensions : class voting in Denmark / Sara B. Hobolt -- The political evolution of class and religion : an interpretation for the Netherlands, 1971-2006 / Nan Dirk De Graaf, Giedo Jansen, and Ariana Need -- Political change and cleavage voting in France: class, religion, political appeals, and voter alignments, 1962-2007 / Florent Gougou and Guillaume Roux -- Social divisions and political choices in Germany, 1980-2006 / Martin Elff -- Class and religious voting in Italy : the rise of policy responsiveness / Oliver Heath and Paolo Bellucci -- Do social divisions explain political choices? the case of Poland / Natalia Letki -- Social class, religiosity, and vote choice in Spain, 1979-2008 / Lluiś Orriols -- The importance of political choice and other lessons learned / Geoffrey Evans and Nan Dirk De Graaf.

"Political Choice Matters investigates the extent to which class and religion influence party choice in contemporary democracies. Rather than the commonly-assumed process in which a weakening of social boundaries leads to declining social divisions in political preferences, this book's primary message is that the supply of choices by parties influences the extent of such divisions: hence, political choice matters. Combining overtime, cross-national data, and multi-level research designs the authors show how policy and programmatic positions adopted by parties provide voters with choice sets that accentuate or diminish the strength of political cleavages. The book gives central place to the positions of political parties on left-right, economically redistributive and morally conservative versus social liberal dimensions. Evidence on these positions is obtained primarily from the Comparative Manifesto Project, with a chapter dedicated to elaborating and validating the various implementations of this uniquely valuable source of evidence on party positions. The primary empirical focus includes case studies of 11 Western, Southern, and Central European societies as well as 'anglo-democracies' including Britain, USA, Canada, and Australia. These detailed analyses of election studies ranging in some cases from the post-war period until the early part of the 21st century are augmented by a pooled cross-national and overtime analysis of 15 Western democracies using a unique, combined dataset of 188 national surveys. The authors show that although there has been some overtime decline in the strength of association between social class and party choice, this is far smaller than the amount of change in the relationship occurring as a result of party movements on questions of inequality and redistribution. The strength of the religiosity cleavage is also influenced by changes in party positions on moral issues - changes that can be understood as a strategic response to a process of secularization that has weakened the electoral viability of parties deriving support from appeals to religious values."--Publisher's website.