Housing and electoral behaviour: The changing face of class voting in advanced democracies

Scholarship on the relationship between social structure and electoral behaviour has traditionally operationalised voters’ economic or class situations in terms of their labour market positions. Such an approach overlooks the growing importance of housing as a source of both socio-structural and electoral division. Using national election studies and household panel data from fourteen countries, I conduct the first systematic, cross-national, and longitudinal analysis of the electoral behaviour of housing market groups, finding that housing represents a strong and growing electoral divide in advanced democracies. Electoral support for centre-right and radical left parties is most strongly associated with housing market position, with homeowners significantly and increasingly more likely to support the former and renters significantly and increasingly more likely to support the latter. When other factors, such as house value and rental contract type are considered, housing based electoral divides appear even greater in scope, to the extent that housing market position is now a stronger predictor of voting for some party families – the centre-right and radical left in particular – than labour market position. These findings challenge the claim that class or economic circumstances have become increasingly unimportant in structuring voting behaviour, and suggest an updated conceptualisation and operationalisation of social stratification – which moves beyond occupation and the labour market – is required to understand the social structuring of contemporary politics.