ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that the newly grown consensus to the effect that class voting has declined since World War II was built on quicksand. Relying on income as a less ambiguous and hence more valid class measure than Paul Nieuwbeerta does, he has demonstrated that class voting has in fact become stronger in the United States since World War II. The data Nieuwbeerta has used to demonstrate the decline of the traditional alignment of the working class with the left and the middle class with the right. The traditional class alignments have clearly weakened in the postwar era, in short, this has not been caused by a decline of class voting, but by an increase of cross-cutting cultural voting. The gradual erosion of the pattern of a leftist-voting working class and a rightist-voting middle class has been caused by an increase of cross-cutting cultural voting, driven by a cultural dynamics that is rooted in educational differences.
