The social roots of the transnational cleavage : education, occupation, and sex

Abstract

We develop a micro approach to assess how social structure is expressed in voting for Green and TAN parties. Using a cleavage perspective we explain the rise of green and TAN parties as a response to a single exogenous shock, an information revolution that transformed capitalism, recast relations among the sexes, and produced the transnational cleavage. We argue that the field in which a person is educated is more influential than the level of education in conditioning a person’s partisanship on the contemporary cleavage, and we extend a field theory of education to occupational variation and gendered sorting to explain vote choice.