The political impact of inequality: Social cleavages and voting in the 1999 elections

Previous studies of electoral behavior in Israel have demonstrated the importance
of ethnic and religious cleavages while finding little evidence for class divisions as a
factor structuring politics and predicting voter preferences. We challenge this
empirical consensus by employing three different methodologies: a reanalysis of
standard survey data; ecological analysis of aggregate election and census results;
and multilevel analysis of pooled individual and aggregate data. All three methods
attribute a major role to class along with other social cleavages. They vary however
in their answers to the question of whether class effects are independent of
ethnicity and religion or conditional upon them.