🌐 Globally:

Half a century ago, the Left appealed mostly to the poor and uneducated, and the Right to the rich and educated.

Nowadays, supporting leftist parties still correlates with lower income (and supporting the Right with higher income), although that link has weakened.

What’s most interesting is that correlation along the “education” axis has reversed: today, it is mostly educated people supporting the Left, and uneducated people supporting the Right.

🔬 Some notable exceptions to that global trend:

In the 🇺🇸 #USA, the influence of income has vanished, and support depends solely (and strongly!) on education (highly educated ↔ leftist).

In #Scandinavia (epitome: 🇸🇪 #Sweden) it’s the opposite: education became irrelevant, and political preference depends only on income (perhaps because they are wealthy, egalitarian countries?).

🇵🇹 #Portugal hasn’t changed like the other countries: there the Right is still supported mostly by educated (and rich) voters. (NB: in the 50’s and 60’s, Portugal was a dictatorship).

🇮🇹 #Italy is the rare case where leftist parties ended up being the parties of the richest segment of the population. I wouldn’t read too much into this, though, as the political landscape there during the last decade or two has been a populist mess.

🇪🇸 #Spain is the country where education and income tell you the least about political preferences! There’s still the secular correlation “high income ↔ right wing”, but it’s very weak today. (NB: in the 50’s and 60’s, Spain was also a dictatorship).

“In the 1950s, most western democracies had an elite party (right-wing) vs. an anti-elite party (left-wing), and the elite party captured both the richest and the best-educated segments of the population. Over time, this shifted to democracies having a multi-elite system: a financial-elite party vs. an educational-elite party.”

“If this [shift in political support] was to happen, this would correspond to a complete realignment of the party system: the former “left” (which used to be associated to low-income, low-education voters) would now be associated to high-income, high-education voters; whereas the former “right” (which used to be associated to high-income, high-education voters) would now be associated to low-income, low-education voters. In effect, such a party system would have little to do with the “left” vs “right” party system of the 1950s-1960s. Maybe it should better be described as an opposition with the “globalists” (high-income, high-education) and the “nativists” (low-income, low-education). This is roughly the way in which the new political actors themselves [in France] – e.g. Macron and Le Pen during the 2017 presidential election – tend to describe what they perceive to be the central political cleavage of our time.”