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Bringing background back in: A Dutch new party and the revival of socio-economic background voting

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Comparative European Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

Western democracies have witnessed gradual decline of voting according to socio-economic background factors. However, the emergence of elderly parties suggests increasing mobilization along generational lines, which would partly reverse this pattern. While religion and class voting have decreased, such new generational divide might make age, education and income salient (again). However, to what extent is support for these parties driven by such mobilization—rather than by a-political protest, or by politics as usual? Focusing on 50Plus in the Netherlands, the most successful current Western elderly party, we find evidence for mobilization on a new divide. Many older, less educated voters who feel poor vote for 50Plus, irrespective of their feelings of mere protest or their position on dominant policy issues. Furthermore, perceptions of 50Plus substantially vary with age and income combined. Our findings suggest that 50Plus heralds the emergence of a novel divide. To what extent this divide revitalizes socio-economic background factors in Western politics remains to be seen.

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Notes

  1. We also ran our models using list-wise deletion, reducing our sample size to just N = 1438. See “Appendix” Table 3 for the results.

  2. Although the statistics for our PTV measures show acceptable values in terms of normal distributions (skew = 1.11, kurtosis = 0.02), we do observe that about half of our respondents (N = 1020) give the lowest possible score, indicating they will never vote for 50Plus (see “Appendix” Fig. 4 for a visual representation of the distribution). We believe, however, this is not problematic for our analyses, because we observe that the higher scores are present in sufficient numbers and always within three times the standard deviation distance from the mean. This indicates that higher values should not be considered outliers. Also, we observe that the residuals in the regression analyses are normally distributed (for Model 1: skew = 0.84, kurtosis = 0.01; for Model 2: skew = 0.83, kurtosis = 0.05), meeting the assumptions required for regression analysis.

  3. In addition to this subjective income measure we also examined objective income. Objective income was gauged with the following formulation: “We would also like to ask you about the monthly net income of your household (all members aged 18 and above), including all pensions and social benefits like child allowances and any other income such as rents.” There were twelve answering options, ranging from “less than 150 euros” to “more than 10,000 euros”. As both measures were obviously quite highly correlated (r = .56) we felt forced to choose between them. The objective income variable had many missing values. Thus, we show the results using subjective income only. Note that the objective income variable did not result in any statistically significant findings whatsoever.

  4. Although multicollinearity is not too high, for theoretical reasons we reran the models based on only issue voting (excluding ideological predispositions), and based on only ideological voting (excluding economic policy issue positions), in turn. We show the results in “Appendix” Table 4. These results do not change our conclusions.

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  1. Amsterdam School of Communication Research, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    J. H. P. van Spanje & R. Azrout

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Appendix

Appendix

See Fig. 4 and Tables 3 and 4.

Fig. 4
figure 4

Distribution of the propensity to vote 50Plus

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Table 3 Predicting propensity to vote for 50Plus using list-wise deletion
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Table 4 Predicting propensity to vote 50Plus with separate models for ideology (left–right) and traditional economic positions
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van Spanje, J.H.P., Azrout, R. Bringing background back in: A Dutch new party and the revival of socio-economic background voting. Comp Eur Polit 18, 363–383 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41295-019-00189-y

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