SSociologists understand voting decisions as an expression of social characteristics. Age, gender, education and income are the classic variables used to describe the voters of political parties. Now you can be left or right all your life, conservative, progressive, liberal or green. But one is not always young and not necessarily always equally educated or wealthy. According to the changes in one’s own social situation, the political preferences should then actually change. This poses particular problems for parties that are very successful with young first-time voters. How to keep them when major changes in their social situation are only a matter of time? Do you then have to change as a party in order not to lose the aging voters? But how are you supposed to attract new, young voters at the same time?
That is the fate of the Greens. The sociologist Markus Klein, who teaches in Hanover, has now summarized the change in the green electorate with the provocative formula that the “academic plebeians” have become a social “patriciate”: from frustrated to saturated, from outsiders to the elite and from poor to wealthy. Only the academic aspect seems to have stayed the same. Klein’s analysis of the “class-structural conditionality of the Green election” is the first to draw on a complete evaluation of the data from the ALLBUS population survey on voting preferences over the past almost forty years.
#Sociology #Green #Voters #Green #Patricians
