Class Voting in Croatia

This paper examines whether class influences vote choice in Croatia, a least-likely‎ case for class voting given three decades of cultural cleavage dominance‎ and party convergence on economic policy. This relationship remains‎ understudied in post-socialist contexts where class mobilization was historically‎ suppressed, and parties never supplied class-differentiated choices. Using‎ original data from the 2024 Croatian National Electoral Study, we test ‎whether subjective class position affects party choice independently of objective‎ material status and whether this effect operates through value orientations.‎ We show that subjective class identification significantly predicts vote‎ choice even after controlling for income, wealth, education, left-right ideology,‎ and value orientations, while objective economic position shows no effect.‎ The analysis reveals that values have an effect on the class-vote relationship‎ for some parties, but class also conditions how values translate into partisan ‎preferences, particularly among working-class voters. These results show that ‎class remains politically relevant even when parties do not mobilize it.‎