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This article examines the development of class voting in the Czech Republic, 1992– 2010. While many Western countries have been experiencing declining or stable associations between class and electoral choice, we hypoth- esize that the trend in class voting should be quite different in the Czech Re- public, and by extension, in other post-communist countries. We theorize that if a country is undergoing a process of re-stratification – the process in which class-based cleavages and identities regain significance in a new market econ- omy after a long period of their de-stratification by communist egalitarian poli- cies – such a country should also experience increases in class voting in the new market environment. Using standard loglinear and logistic regression approaches, our analysis confirms that class voting has indeed increased in the Czech Republic, particularly from 1998–2010. That increase is large both in the gross effect of class as well as its effect net of the role of other demographic variables. The Czech Republic is therefore relatively unique among countries examined in the international literature on class voting in having increasing associations across several electoral periods.
Keywords: class voting, class politics, social stratification, politics in the Czech Republic.
Sociologický časopis / Czech Sociological Review, 2011, Vol. 47, No. 1: 33–59
