Parties on both sides of the political spectrum can attract voters by addressing the working class. New research shows that even middle class voters reward political candidates for stating that they intend to prioritise the working class.
29.04.2021 | MIA ULVGRAVEN
131 years have passed since the first International Workers’ Day took place. But apparently, class struggle has not gone out of fashion.
New research suggests that politicians are still able to obtain votes by appealing directly to the working class. This is true for both of the political parties that are traditionally the largest in Denmark: The Social Democratic Party and the Danish Liberal Party.
“The working class is not quite as outdated a notion as many people would think,” says election scholar and professor of political science Rune Stubager from Aarhus BSS, Aarhus University.
Together with colleagues from Leiden University in the Netherlands, Oxford in Great Britain and the Institute for Social Research in Norway, he has conducted experiments with more than 5,000 participants in Denmark as well as the United States.
The Danish participants were each presented with a fictional politician named Klaus Hansen, a candidate from either the Danish Liberal Party or the Social Democratic Party running for the Danish Parliament. Some of the test subjects were told that ‘Klaus Hansen’ had recently stated that his party believed it to be time to prioritise the working class. Others were not.
The version of Klaus Hansen who wanted to prioritise the working class was by far the most popular, regardless of which party he represented in the survey, the researchers conclude.
On a scale from 0 to 10, ‘Klaus Hansen from the Danish Liberal Party’ increased his average score in the evaluation by one and a half point when he appealed to the working class compared to when he did not. Among voters belonging to the working class themselves, his score was three points higher.
“That is a very convincing effect,” says Rune Stubager.
Benefiting both swings and roundabouts
The new study also shows that politicians do not lose ground in the middle class by addressing the working class.
“It is not like the swings and roundabouts principle, you do not gain something in one spot just to lose it in another. We can observe that even quite far into the middle class, people prefer the candidate who intend to help the working class. It is a win-win situation,” says Rune Stubager.
This is interesting, seeing as the middle class holds a lot of voters. According to Rune Stubager, half of the Danish population say they belong to the middle class, while approximately 15% feel they are part of the working class.
"Both Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Anders Fogh Rasmussen practically put class struggle to verbal death during the 00s by stating that we had moved beyond this conflict as a society"
Rune Stubager, professor of political science, Aarhus BSS
Untapped voter potential
Rune Stubager reports that in general, people tend to base their vote less on social classes now than previously.
“Presumably, the explanation is that politicians no longer speak about social classes. Helle Thorning-Schmidt and Anders Fogh Rasmussen practically put class struggle to verbal death during the 00s by stating that we had moved beyond this conflict as a society,” says Rune Stubager.
However, previous research has demonstrated that class society is still alive in people’s minds. Based on his new study, Rune Stubager deems that it holds an untapped voter potential.
“All things being equal, if politicians addressed the working class more extensively, they should be able to obtain more votes,” he says, adding that the Social Democratic Party might be working towards this end, e.g. by distributing photographs of the prime minister’s plain lunch and by naming a pension scheme after the worker Arne, who also figured in the 2020 edition of prime minister Mette Frederiksen’s speech on 1 May.
READ MORE: The class society is alive - and so what?
More about the study:
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