Social Dimensions of Party Choice in Albania

The main purpose of this article is to examine whether the concepts of “class voting” and political cleavages used in studies of western democracies are of relevance in post-communist Albania. The analysis of voting behavior, based on a representative survey conducted in late 2003, resulted in only weak correlations between voting and socio-demographic variables such as gender, age, and education. A weak tendency for class voting was evident, but in the opposite direction to what is common in western democracies in that non-manual workers voted more frequently for the Socialist Party than did manual workers. The main political cleavage in Albania is the regional divide between the more-developed south, where the majority has preferred the Socialist Party, and the less-developed north, where the majority has voted for the Democratic Party.