Two Lefts and Two Rights: Class Voting and Cultural Voting in the Netherlands, 2002

Ever since he published his book The Silent Revolution (1977), American political scientist Ronald Inglehart has maintained that due to increasing affluence, ‘postmaterialist’ values, pertaining to the primacy of individual liberty and selfattainment, have moved center stage in Western countries. This is held to have resulted in the rise of a ‘new political culture’, that has increasingly overshadowed the ‘old political culture’, central to which were issues concerning the distribution of wealth and income between society’s classes (Inglehart 1977, 1990, 1997, see also Clark 1998, 2001, Dalton et al. 1984, Hechter 2004, Rempel and Clark 1997).