ABSTRACT

The middle class has a clear tendency to vote Republican and the cross-pressured working class to vote Democratic. The chapter presents issue the salience by means of an open-ended question about what one considers the most important problem facing the country. The increase of cultural issue salience among the American population does not go at the cost of that of class issues. The major weakness of the received conceptualization of class voting— as measured by the Robert R. Alford index and it's statistically more advanced contemporary offshoots— resides in the assumption that class-based economic interests underlie the relationship between class and voting. The conventional conception of class voting—the relationship between class and voting—as a baseline, the idea that class voting and cultural voting work in opposite directions informs two hypotheses. The foregoing leads us to two additional hypotheses, that both relate to the role of issue salience in determining the strengths of class voting and cultural voting.