Voting LPF: Stratification and the Varying Importance of Attitudes

A BSTRACT Large differences exist between socio-cultural specialists and technocrats in the extent they voted for the List Pim Fortuyn (LPF), showing us that support for the party was aligned by social class. Distinguishing between the two specialist types provided the opportunity to test Kitschelt’s hypothesis on the importance of communicative experiences and capabilities in the labour market and the importance of cultural and economic ethnic threats. Cultural ethnic threat explains social class differences in LPF voting better than economic ethnic threat, though we cannot claim that the latter is of no relevance. We show this using the Dutch sample of the European Social Survey ( n = 2,260). Moreover, we show that sociopolitical attitudes that affect voting for the LPF do so to a much smaller extent among lowereducated people and non-socio-cultural specialists. The interactions between socio-political attitudes and education and social class are significant.