Following up on the previous post on education and interest in politics, I have been looking at data from the European Social Survey on party choice and income levels in Portugal. The graph above is based on the latest round of the European Social Survey. Data for upper income levels in particular (8, 9, and 10th decile) should not really trusted as the sample become very small. The question that was asked was “which party did you vote for in the last national election?”. There are two fairly interesting things: the first are the staggering levels of abstention among lower incomes. For the first decile, more than half of respondents said that they hadn’t voted in the last election, and the abstention party is the largest party up to the 7th decile. Respondents are very reluctant to declare their (high) income, so there are actually very few respondents in the 8, 9th and 10th decile. The second interesting thing is that there are very few differences between the socialists and the PSD regarding their success across income levels. In another post, I had shown that income is a strong predictor of vote choice in the UK. This does not seem to be the case in Portugal.