Category Archives: democratic reform overseas

class inversion in France

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After the 2022 French election, I wrote:

The left should represent the lower-income half of the population; the right should represent the top half. When that happens, the left will generally advocate government spending and regulation. Such policies may or may not be wise, but they can be changed if they fail and prove unpopular. Meanwhile, the right will advocate less government, which (again) may or may not be desirable but will not destroy the constitutional order. After all, limited government is a self-limiting political objective.

When the class-distribution turns upside down, the left will no longer advocate impressive social reforms, because its base will be privileged. And the right will no longer favor limited government, because tax cuts don’t help the poor much. The right will instead embrace government activism in the interests of traditional national, racial or religious hierarchies. The left will frustrate change, while the right–now eager to use the government for its objectives–will become genuinely dangerous.

I wrote this as a US citizen, concerned that the Democratic Party relies on upper-income liberals while the GOP is increasingly based in the working class. But the pattern is seen internationally, which should influence how we seek to explain it.

At that time, I noted that the French electorate had turned upside-down. The right-wing far surpassed the center and the left among voters from the lowest occupational class, while the top stratum of the society favored the center or the left.

The same pattern was not clear in Britain’s recent election, where Labour performed about as well across the social spectrum (although the Tories did best among workers). However, the inversion did repeat in last week’s French election, as shown in the graphic with this post.

The data come from IPSOS. The occupational categories, in declining order of prestige, are: “cadre,” “profession intermédiaire,” “employé,” and “ouvrier.” (See more here.) The parties, in order from left to right, are the leftist New Popular Front, Macron’s “Ensemble,” the Gaullist Republicans, and the rightwing National Rally.

The inversion is most clearly illustrated by a comparison between Ensemble and the National Rally. Macron drew from the top; the right-wing party, from the bottom. But the supposedly left-wing New Popular Front performed worst among workers (ouvriers), and was the top choice of the managerial class (cadres).

IPSOS also asked about self-described class, educational attainment, and economic circumstances. The patterns are the same as shown in my graphic, but I thought that occupation would be the most reliable measure. (Reports of class identity and economic circumstances can be affected by people’s political views, rather than the reverse; but IPSOS derives its occupational categories from people’s actual jobs.)

In the USA, race is certainly relevant. The working-class Americans who have shifted right are mostly (but not exclusively) white. This may also be the case in other countries, but it is important not to assume that race and racism explain the class inversion without looking more closely at the data from the country. Unfortunately, per French law, voters cannot be asked about their race/ethnicity. However, in the IPSOS poll, just 16 percent of Catholics, versus 34 percent of members of other religions, voted for the left, and the “other” category may pick up a fair proportion of immigrants. This may suggest that some French citizens who identify as white and Catholic are voting for the right on cultural/national grounds, but that explanation is not clear from these data.

See also: UK election results by social class; social class inversion in the 2022 US elections;  class inversion as an alternative to the polarization thesis; social class in the [2022 French election; and what does the European Green surge mean?

Social class in the 2024 UK general election

UK election results by social class

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One of my obsessions is the social-class inversion that has been visible in several countries in the 21st century, in which parties of the left draw their strongest support from highly educated, “professional” voters and those on the right appeal best to the working class. Under those circumstances, left parties will block bold economic initiatives (which would cost their voters), and right parties may offer ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism, since libertarian economic policies have little relevance to workers. This is potentially a road to fascism.

The full exit polls from yesterday's UK election do not seem to be available yet (I assume they are still embargoed for the media companies that subscribe to Ipsos' service), so I have used Ipsos' final pre-election survey as a rough substitute. The interactive graphic above lets you see each party's support by social class.

The image above this post simplifies matters by grouping the Tories and Reform as "all right," and Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists as "all left."

You can see evidence here of a class inversion, but it is not as dramatic as in some 21st century elections. The Reform and Green parties illustrate the pattern best, drawing their support (respectively) from the bottom and the top of the social class structure. The Conservatives perform best at the bottom, but only by a bit. In all, the right does considerably better among semi-skilled and unskilled workers than among managers and professionals, but Labour holds its own across all categories, blurring the pattern.

I would argue that Labour must pursue policies that benefit the lowest social class category, not only for social justice but also to reverse the class inversion that threatens democracy itself.

See also: social class inversion in the 2022 US elections;  class inversion as an alternative to the polarization thesis; social class in the French election.

setbacks for authoritarianism?

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It’s easy to imagine authoritarianism as a ratchet: a device that can be tightened but not loosened again.

An authoritarian leader and/or party wins an election, perhaps with a substantial base of authentic supporters. Instead of blatantly overturning the constitution in a “self-coup,” the government uses a whole range of available tools to discourage opposition and secure continued power. These tools include changing the electoral system (perhaps subtly), taking over the state media, raising the cost of private media, altering curricula and removing hostile educators, selectively investigating and prosecuting opponents, heavily surveilling private communications, channeling economic benefits to supporters and potential supporters, forming close partnerships with local oligarchs, shifting power from the legislature to the executive, governing by decree and executive action, packing the civil service and judiciary with friendly appointees, encouraging opponents to emigrate while selectively refusing entry visas to journalists and activists, banning overseas NGOs and funders, encouraging the police and security forces to use visible violence, and using rhetoric that links authoritarian means to popular ends, such as prosperity or religious or ethnic domination.

Authoritarians have so many tools and opportunities that it’s easy to predict a one-way path.

Nevertheless, the following parties and/or leaders who meet at least some of the previous description have suffered setbacks or outright losses: Trump in the USA (2020), Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro (2022), the Law and Justice Party in Poland (2023), Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan and the AKP (2024), and India’s Narendra Modi and the BJP (2024). I would add South Africa’s ANC (2024), although I would anticipate disagreement about that case.

It appears that “backsliding” is not a rigid and predictable process, any more than “transition to democracy” was (Cianetti & Hanley 2021). Looking at data from many countries, Brownlee & Miao find that a one-way journey toward fascism really was a pattern in the 1920s and 1930s, but at other times, there has a lot of movement in both directions, with a slight predominance of shifts away from authoritarianism (Brownlee & Miao 2022). Regimes that combine some elements of democracy, such as genuine elections, with authoritarian practices appear to be unstable, almost always teetering to one side or the other in time (Carothers 2018)

I think that civil societies are more resistant than we might fear. To put it more forcefully, it’s not so easy to boss people around.

An authoritarian party always takes over at the expense of rival political movements and would-be leaders, who have strong incentives to push back at an opportune time.

Authoritarian governments and their opponents continually innovate. Every tool of control sooner or later produces a technique for subversion. (Unfortunately, the opposite is also true: each form of resistance meets a new form of control.) One reason for waves of authoritarianism or democratization is that one side may temporarily lead in this competition, but then the other side catches up.

It is also difficult for any administration to remain popular for long. Unanticipated events–such as the current global bout of inflation–will turn people against a leader even if he doesn’t deserve the blame. Once a leader is unpopular, there are rewards to opposing him. It is risky to permit elections, even if they are subtly manipulated, but it is also hard to avoid them.

By the same token, defeating a would-be authoritarian doesn’t end the struggle, as illustrated by the USA today.

Lea Ypi, Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History

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Lea Ypi is a political theorist who has written a prize-winning memoir entitled Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History (Norton, 2021). You don’t have to be interested in political theory, philosophy–or any academic discipline–to enjoy and benefit from this book. It is an engrossing story about coming of age during an extraordinary time and in an unusual household composed of vivid characters. For the most part, the vantage point is that of a child or adolescent. The plot is compelling, and I don’t want to give that away. I was genuinely surprised by some of the twists.

It is, however, no secret that Ypi is now an influential leftwing public intellectual who was born in the extremely communist state of Albania and experienced the collapse of that regime when she was a young teenager. One might ask whether she is highly critical of capitalism today because of her formative experiences during a disastrous “transition” to a market economy. Likewise, one might ask whether other people have been anti-communist because they experienced Stalin, or Albania’s Enver Hoxha.

I think Ypi’s answer would be: Yes. Our “biographies” (a fraught word under the Albanian communist system) do shape what we think. Jailing or shooting potential critics was evil, but the Party was not foolish to distrust people whose formative experiences would lean them to anti-Communism. Our circumstances shape us.

The next question might be whether knowing that someone holds a view because of personal experiences invalidates that view. For example, should we discount Ypi’s current politics because she was influenced by extreme circumstances at a formative moment?

Here, her answer would be: No. Our fate is to live at specific times in history. The best we can do is to critically assess the world that we find and work with others to improve it. This is “politics,” in the best sense of that word. It is also “freedom.” To be free is to bring your individual experiences into a consequential public debate with other people who are different from you. That is dangerous or even impossible under a dictatorship, but it is also difficult in contexts like the contemporary European Union, where there is “no politics left, only policy” (p. 227).

If Ypi holds a general political/economic theory, it’s not in her memoir. In fact, she says that she was planning to write a “philosophical book about the overlapping ideas of freedom in the liberal and Socialist traditions” (which sounds like an attempted synthesis), but “when I started writing, ideas turned into people–the people who made me who I am.” She adds: “They loved and fought each other; they had different conceptions of themselves, and of their obligations. They were, as Marx writes, the product of social relations for which they were not responsible, but they still tried to rise above them” (p. 263).

This passage is about as abstract as this book gets. Otherwise, it is about specific people, including the narrator. But the whole memoir conveys the idea that freedom is “trying to rise above” current injustices while treating other human beings as responsible individuals with perspectives of their own.

The epigraph is a quotation from Rosa Luxemburg: “Human beings do not make history of their own free will. But they make history nevertheless.” Ypi vividly and empathetically depicts people who are not free–and who cannot see the truth objectively or independently–but who still strive to make the world better. That is her definition of freedom.

See also: Arendt, freedom, Trump; Hannah Arendt and thinking from the perspective of an agent; don’t confuse bias and judgment; some notes on identity from a civic perspective academic freedom for individuals and for groups; and a case for liberalism.

Henry Milner, Participant/Observer: An Unconventional Life in Politics and Academia

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On Labor Day, I very much enjoyed reading the memoir of my friend Henry Milner, entitled Participant/Observer.

Born in a refugee camp in Germany in 1946 to Polish-Jewish survivors, Henry grew up as a Baby Boomer in Montreal. As he navigated the turbulent waters of his time and place as both a political scientist and an activist, he became an Anglophone Quebecois nationalist, an expert proponent of Scandinavian social democracy, a liberal on social issues, and sometimes a critic of the Quebecois public sector unions to which he belonged. He has played significant roles that have put him in the “rooms where it happened,” notably as one of the most senior Anglophones in the leadership of the Parti Quebecois (PQ) during its heyday and as one of the key diplomats for that party in international social democratic circles.

I know and admire people–possibly readers of this blog post–who have deep commitments on all sides of these issues. Some would be more prone to take the unions’ side or less enthusiastic about the Swedish welfare state or more critical of Quebecois nationalism or less favorable to Anglophone involvement in that movement. I’m not qualified to defend Henry’s positions, but I think that any reader should appreciate his memoir as the story of a thoughtful and public-spirited person who has tried to exercise good judgment on difficult questions and has contributed effort as well as opinions. For instance, he sometimes made the English translations of politically sensitive PQ documents.

Milner raises general questions that are worth consideration. For example:

1/ Must organized labor clash with social democratic parties when labor represents a small minority of the workforce and is strongest in the public sector? (This is the situation in the USA now, as well as in Canada.) Milner argues that Scandinavian unions can advocate growth and modernization–shifting workers to new and different jobs–because they represent most of the population. In contrast, unions that represent small segments of the public become protective of the status quo and compete with disadvantaged people.

2/ Do participants in politics know things that political scientists cannot know? Is the reverse also true? In general, how should we think about the relationship between science and experience?

(I count five professions that claim expertise about politics: reporters, civil servants, lobbyists, political scientists, and politicians themselves. Do they all have valid insights? Can the methods of political science capture all the others’ perspectives if scholars study participants’ beliefs well?)

3/ How can democracies provide robust voluntary adult education for democracy without allowing it to degenerate into propaganda? I encountered Milner years ago as an expert on Scandinavian adult civic education and have only grown more supportive of that cause over time. We can’t rely on civic education for children and college students alone, since most citizens have long ago outgrown those phases. At times, Americans have adopted Scandinavian exports like Folks Schools and Study Circles. Americans contributed (with others, including Germans) to building a robust system of adult education in post-War West Germany (Levine 2023). Nevertheless, today we lack an impressive policy for adult civic education in the USA, and it’s hard to see how we could create one in the face of intense partisan polarization.

Overall, Milner’s trajectory has been from a socialist who was always deeply democratic to a democrat who seeks social equity, and from there to a proponent of civic education and electoral reform as bulwarks of democracy.

Source: P. Levine, “The Democratic Mission of Higher Education: A Review Essay.” Political Science Quarterly (2023). See also an overview of civic education in the USA and Germany; what does it mean that 130 million adult Americans lack literacy?; the Nordic model; etc.