Polarity Reversal: The Socioeconomic Reconfiguration of Partisan Support in Knowledge Societies

Abstract

This article proposes a framework to analyze realignment processes in countries that transition from industrial to knowledge societies. It characterizes the electorate in terms of two traits that are main predictors for attitudes in a two-dimensional policy space of economic and noneconomic issues: income (low vs. high) and education (low vs. high). The framework divides the electorate into four groups—based on the interaction of these two dichotomized traits—and predicts how and when the voting propensities of these four groups change over time. Using a wide variety of data sources, the article tests hypotheses regarding changing voting behavior of education-income groups, as well as cross-national differences across twenty-one rich democracies.