How is it that the Swedish populist nationalist party the Sweden Democrats receives its strongest support from the established working class, in spite of the high degree of class voting and left–right mobilization which is known to characterize Swedish politics? Based on surveys from the SOM (Society, Opinion, Media) Institute as well as the Swedish National Elections Studies, this article shows that this is not a result of increasing anti-immigrant attitudes in the working class or of decreasing left–right polarization among voters. Rather, we present the argument that the weakening alignment between the working class and the Social Democratic Party and the weakened left–right polarization between the main parties have created a structure which has left room for a realignment between large parts of the working class and the Sweden Democrats along the alternative underlying ideological dimension of authoritarianism/libertarianism.

This chapter explores the explanatory power of the social cleavage model presented by Lipset and Rokkan in the 1960s. According to most of the dominant literature, the explanatory power of this model has declined over time. This trend is confirmed in this chapter. However, the findings in this chapter also show that social cleavage voting must be seen as the result of an interaction between groups in society on the one hand, and the political parties on the other. Changes in party appeal or party strategies are important factors to consider to understand the evolution of social cleavage voting.

Studies of the relationship between class position and political outlooks still only have a limited understanding of the class-related mechanisms that matter for ideological orientations. This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the mechanisms that link class position and left/right and authoritarian/libertarian orientations. Besides main factors such as income, career prospects, job security, education, class origin and class identification, the significance of work-related factors such as work autonomy, working in a team, a physically demanding job and a mentally demanding job is studied. The findings are based on a survey specifically designed for this purpose and collected in Sweden in 2008/2009. A great deal of the association between class position and left/right orientations is explained by socio-economic conditions; different classes sympathize with policies that will benefit them economically. Another important factor is class identification. Work-related factors also have relevance, but the effect of class position on left/right orientations works mainly through the remuneration system. Class position is also related to authoritarian/libertarian orientations. However, this relationship is less explained by socio-economic position per se, but is rather an effect of the educational system and its allocation of the workforce into different class positions. It also turns out that work-related factors do not explain the class effects; however, a physically demanding job shows a unique effect. Overall, our findings suggest that besides factors such as class position, income, education and class identification, we need to consider work-related aspects to derive a more complete understanding of the distribution of ideological orientations in Western societies.

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Why do governments recognize rights? In this article, we rely on natural experiments and an innovative matching technique to identify a new causal mechanism of policy feedback, which we refer to as the "recognition" effect. We rely on the "hard case" of health care to demonstrate that attitudes towards the health system change in response to government policy change and, indeed, even to rightsbased initiatives. During the time when public opinion surveys on public satisfaction with the health system were in the field, governments in both Germany and Sweden introduced a new right: the right to a maximum waiting time for health services. This serendipity allowed us to compare respondents' attitudes both before (control) and after the implementation of the waiting time guarantee (treatment), using coarsened exact matching to account for the imbalances in the treatment and control groups. We find that respondents interviewed after implementation of the new waiting time guarantees (in contrast to those interviewed before the introduction of the guarantees) express higher levels of satisfaction with the health system in general, but do not evaluate their specific medical treatment (including waiting times) more positively. We interpret this finding as evidence that citizens respond to governmental recognition of their rights as a good per se, independent of their personal experience with the particular public service at hand. Thus, we argue that theories of policy feedback need to move beyond their focus on direct material experience with the policies at hand, and to incorporate mechanisms of symbolic action and normative valuations into their causal models.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.