Lifestyle as a Social Marker: Exploring the Link between Lifestyle and Political Choice in Quebec

The weakening of traditional social cleavages in predicting political preferences does not mean that group membership for detecting political behaviour no longer exists—it may only be the case that the boundaries of these groups need to be redefined. Using original and unique data, this article investigates the relevance of lifestyle for capturing and delineating social groups sharing political attitudes. Logistic regression machine learning models test how lifestyle predicts political behaviour alongside conventional sociodemographic variables. K-means clustering identifies three Quebecer lifestyle profiles and their relationship to sociodemographic features. Findings show lifestyle better predicts voting intentions and lifestyle clusters significantly associated with vote choice, even after controlling for sociodemographics. This research reassesses the weakening of socio-structural influences and the importance of contextual and individual variables in understanding political behaviour.