A New Dimension of Social Stratification in Poland? Class Membership and Electoral Voting in 1991–2001

In contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, the debate on class politics takes on a different form to that in the West—its concern is whether class divisions increased as the post-communist societies made the transition to the market system. Using Polish survey data on respondents voting behaviour in elections of 1991, 1994, 1997, and 2001, I present evidence on the significance of social class for voting behaviour. Results of log-linear analysis show that class membership does indeed exert a significant impact on voting behaviour. Although it changed across the time, it appeared no less in 2001 than in 1991. Also the patterns of this association (which class votes which party?) remained unchanged. On the whole our evidence suggests that in Poland a new dimension of social stratification—that which is referred in sociological literature as ‘class politics’—has emerged. At the same time, claims for the class basis of voting in Poland should not be exaggerated, as the class-vote link in Poland is much lower than in most of the Western societies. To estimate the relative strength of this association I compared it across 17 countries using data from the European Social Survey 2002. Interest in class voting is based on assumption that i