A major issue in political sociology has been the relationship between class and political action. Daniel Oesch of the Department of Political Science at the University of Geneva in ‘The changing shape of class voting: An individual-level analysis of party support in Britain, Germany and Switzerland’ explores the contentious issue of class voting. Starting out from a critical examination of the thesis of class dealignment, he argues that subsequent debates have been marked by contradictory understandings of what the idea of class voting implies. In particular, ‘class voting’ is not simply an issue of working class voting for parties of the left. Using a refined class schema, Oesch shows clear evidence of an association between class and voting in all three of the countries investigated.
The two following articles are concerned with the structure and actions of political elites. In ‘Party politics in Portugal: Municipalities and central government’, Maria Antónia Pires de Almeida of the CIES at ISCTE in Lisbon looks at politics and power relations at both local and national level. She is, in particular, interested in movement from mayoral to parliamentary positions and the social backgrounds of those who are able to make such moves. She shows that, despite political reforms and the growth of an anti-party mood, party mechanisms are still the most important determinants of political movement, even among ‘independent’ candidates. New citizen's groups have, so far, had little impact on formal politics in Portugal. Willem-Jan Verhoeven works in the Department of Law and Criminology at Erasmus University, Rotterdam. His thesis in ‘Income advantages of CP members before and during the transformation process’ is that the former Communist Party elites in Former Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Russia have continued to secure income advantages for themselves following the transition to capitalist and more democratic systems. These class advantages have diminished somewhat in Slovakia and Hungary, reflecting some specific features of their transition.
Gindo Tampubolon of the University of Manchester turns attention from income to consumption. In ‘Distinction in Britain, 2001–2004? Unpacking homology and the aesthetics of the popular class’ he undertakes a mapping of the homology between social structural positions and cultural preferences. These results are achieved through the use of latent class analysis, and Tampubolon argues that his analyses discloses significant evidence in support of the homology thesis. Starting from a critical consideration of Bourdieu's views, he looks at stratificational effects in music consumption. There is a differentiation of the social classes around genres of music and around musical venues. He shows that there is, indeed, a differentiation between the musical preferences of a dominant and a popular class, resulting in a polarisation of this particular aspect of cultural consumption.
The remaining three articles concern issues of the labour market and its relationship to informal support, picking up on some issues discussed in articles in issue 10(1) of European Societies. Ilona Kova′cs and Sarah Falcão Casaca of the Sociology Unit at the Lisbon School of Economics and Management write on Labour Segmentation and employment diversity in Portugal, taking the ICT sector as a case example. In this rapidly changing sector, they show, there is a complex mixture of high-knowledge and lowknowledge areas of employment. The development of this new and advanced sector of work has not resulted in the building of a homogeneous sector of intelligent and high-knowledge work. There is, instead, a highly segmented pattern of employment, both in terms of type of work and area of employment. The digital divide repeats the gender divide of the wider society and establishes a polarisation of working hours and working conditions between men and women. They document clearly the concentration of women in low-end jobs. They demonstrate this in some detail through their study of call centres.
‘The influence of formal and informal support systems on the labour supply of divorced mothers’ by Peter Raeymaeckers, Caroline Dewilde, Laurent Snoeckx, and Dimitri Mortelmans of the Department of Sociology in the University of Antwerp, Belgium, presents evidence on the post-divorce position of women in the labour market. Using data for 13 countries from the European Community Household Panel, they show that the supply of such female labour is dependent upon the whole state of welfare and informal support, and not merely on the specific family policies introduced in a country. It is, in particular, the interplay between formal and informal support practices that plays the crucial part. They raise interesting questions about the applicability of Esping-Anderson's typology of welfare regimes, arguing that the effects of such formal differences are significantly influenced by the prevailing pattern of informal support.
In ‘A comparative perspective on intergenerational support: Responsiveness to parental needs in individualistic and familialistic countries’, Chiara Saraceno of the Faculty of Political Sciences at the University of Turin and M. Kalmijn of the Department of Sociology at Tilburg University use the SHARE survey to explore the question of the support by adult children of elderly parents. Evidence for ten European countries shows the extent of instrumental transfers from the employment sector to the domestic sector through parent-support. This support was found to be stronger in countries with a more familialstic culture.