Class Voting in Croatia

This paper examines whether class influences vote choice in Croatia, a least-likely case for class voting given three decades of cultural cleavage dominance and party convergence on economic policy. This relationship remains understudied in post-socialist contexts where class mobilization was historically suppressed, and parties never supplied class-differentiated choices. Using original data from the 2024 Croatian National Electoral Study, we test whether subjective class position affects party choice independently of objective material status and whether this effect operates through value orientations. We show that subjective class identification significantly predicts vote choice even after controlling for income, wealth, education, left-right ideology, and value orientations, while objective economic position shows no effect. The analysis reveals that values have an effect on the class-vote relationship for some parties, but class also conditions how values translate into partisan preferences, particularly among working-class voters. These results show that class remains politically relevant even when parties do not mobilize it

Class (philosophy · Convergence (economics · Identification (biology · Position (finance · Ranked voting system · Value (mathematics · Voting · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Populism, Right-Wing Movements · Social Policy and Reform Studies