Recent research has consistently shown that more educated and wealthier strata of the population have increasingly shifted from right-wing to left-wing parties. Other works suggest that left-wing parties have abandoned class-based priorities to focus on new middle-class needs and that radical-right parties have become recipients of disenfranchised working-class voters. As a consequence, lowest strata of society seem to be less and less represented, as the parties that should represent them have targeted other more socially integrated groups.
Whether these transformations have yielded forms of alienation of lower social classes from the political system is however less investigated. Thus, in this paper we address a key research question: do the inequalities observed in terms of political representation exist also when it comes to political participation? Do less resourceful people have stepped out from the system altogether?
So far, the literature has tried to answer this question using data with limited time span and limited geographical scope. The aim of this paper is to investigate the patterns of unequal participation in the last sixty years in European countries. Relying on the data provided by the World Political Cleavages and Inequality Database (WPCID) and integrating it with two other European-wide dataset (European Social Survey and European Election Studies), we show that differences in political participation have grown consistently among lower strata of the population: lower educated and economically unprivileged people have demobilized in Europe.