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Scholars have shown a consistent decline in class voting over time, arguing that social class no longer structures political competition. Yet, the loss of the explanatory power of social class should be attributed to the shift of left-wing parties towards less friendly issue positions for their class-based electorate and not entirely to demand-side explanations. This article focuses on the explanatory factors underpinning the decline of class voting, in particular economic and cultural ones. It does so by relying on a longitudinal dataset including survey data from the EES and party manifesto data from the CMP over the last 25 years in 12 European countries. Results show that when class-based parties adopt pro-labour positions, class voting is reinforced. By contrast, when class-bloc parties stand out for their pro-multiculturalism positions, class voting weakens significantly. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1987108. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Results of the last electoral season in Western Europe have been mostly seen in the light of the success of challenger, anti-establishment parties. According to this narrative, past elections have been overwhelmingly dominated by cultural issues such as immigration and the EU. However, these accounts suffer from several limitations. First, they generally focus on the determinants of the static component of electoral results (i.e. vote choice) rather than the factors leading to vote change (i.e. the individual-level component of aggregate electoral change). Second, relying on party manifestos and programmatic platforms, they usually offer a party-based reconstruction of the general climate of elections. As a consequence, they provide only an indirect, at best limited, overview of the actual political issues that might have driven electoral results. To overcome these limitations, in this paper we introduce a new methodological strategy to characterize electoral results in comparative perspective. To do so we leverage an issue-rich public opinion dataset to estimate individual-level vote change towards each party as a function of issue-based party-voter affinity measures in 6 European countries. Relying on 38 logistic regression models (one for each party), our results contradict many current interpretations of electoral results in Western Europe, in fact showing that economic issues, rather than broad cultural ones, emerged as the most relevant predictors of vote inflows. Furthermore, it also demonstrates the relevance of "cross-ideological" mobilization across all the 6 countries covered in this study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]