Sociodemographic inequalities and political cleavages

Drawing principally on the World Political Cleavages and Inequality Database (WPID), I carry out three distinct but highly-related analyses that help contribute to the debate on sociodemographic inequalities and political transformations in contemporary democratic societies. First, I update the WPID for 18 countries with newly available electoral surveys, documenting how political cleavages have progressed in recent years while discussing potential drivers of these findings. Next, I look specifically at the sociodemographic origins of nativist parties across a number of Latin American, Eastern European, and Western countries in recent decades, identifying patterns in support for these movements and considering plausible economic drivers of their emergence. Finally, I undertake a study of "vote switchers" both to nativist movements and to electoral abstention, investigating how levels of party polarization over redistributive policy issues may relate to the party origins of these phenomena. In the first analysis, I report evidence of a continued progression away from class-oriented political conflict in Western countries, with more context-dependent evolutions in non-Western settings. In the latter two segments, I present a number of findings consistent with the idea that economic drivers are of paramount importance for explaining common trends in the evolution of modern political competition.