PERCEIVED PARTY CHOICE AND CLASS VOTING

This article presents tests of effects of social class background on v oters' perceptions of most and least favoured federal parties, perceiv ed party differences and subjective class voting. The data were taken from the 1984 Canadian National Election Study. The results show that subjective class voting extended to voters' beliefs about least liked parties. And the greater the perceived differences between voters' pre ferred parties and their second and third choice parties, the greater the level of class voting. An index which combined respondents' percep tions of the class orientations of most and least liked parties increa sed the estimate of the level of subjective class voting that takes pl ace. The results suggest that this index provides an improved way of a ssessing subjective class voting. This index is a useful improvement u pon previous measures because it incorporates information on the exten t to which voters see Canadian politics as presenting class-based alte rnatives. This is the conceptual domain of the dependent variable in t he literature on subjective class voting, but perceived class-based al ternatives are seldom measured directly.