While political participation has generally been linked to individual resources, the rise of contentious politics has been historically linked to the rise of the labour movement against capitalism. As such, subjective class identification with the working class can be understood as a driver of unconventional or protest participation. On the other hand, professional objective class positions can also be linked to higher levels of participation from the standpoint of the resource model. In this paper, we investigate the patterns that link class — both subjective, in terms of identification, and objective, in terms of occupation and labour market position — to both conventional and unconventional political participation. While the class cleavage is said to have become progressively less salient during the post-war period, we examine the extent to which it still holds relevance in both its objective and subjective types for political participation. Moreover, the rise of new value cleavages from the 1960s onwards is understood to have broadened the class bases of protest participation to include middle-class professionals. Recently, the economic crisis and the rise of movements against austerity have revamped the interest of scholars in the social bases of protest and the role of class in the emergence of the massive anti-austerity protest wave of the Great Recession. We analyse the role of subjective and objective social class for conventional and unconventional political participation with a detailed original cross-national survey conducted in 2015 in nine European countries.