Does class-based campaigning work? How working class appeals attract and polarize voters

Recent elections have featured various politicians directly appealing to the working class, yet we know little about how citizens react to class appeals from candidates. We investigate this question using survey experiments conducted in the United States and Denmark. We show that symbolic class rhetoric substantially influences candidate evaluations and ultimately polarizes these evaluations across class lines. We also unpack how class appeals work and find that while they increase perceptions of representation among working class voters, they have a more limited effect on perceptions of candidates’ ideological position. Our results help explain how class affects voter decision-making and contribute to broader discussions about the role of political elites in activating social cleavages.Institutions, Decisions and Collective Behaviou

In the eye of the beholder: What determines how people sort others into social classes?

Contrary to much conventional wisdom, this article shows that class is still used by people to sort others into groups, that this sorting is largely on the basis of income and occupation and that it occurs in conditions of both high and low income inequality. Uniquely, we use both open-ended survey questions and a factorial survey experiment to show that people from high (Britain) and low (Denmark) inequality countries are willing to define classes and they do so mainly in terms of job and income. Even though people in the two countries classify others using somewhat different class labels – with working class labels being used more frequently in Britain than in Denmark – we find a common underlying pattern to the classification. This indicates that class categorization takes place according to a strong underlying mental schema.FSW – Publicaties zonder aanstelling Universiteit Leide

The education effect: higher educational qualifications are robustly associated with beneficial personal and socio-political outcomes

Level of education is a predictor of a range of important outcomes, such as political interest and cynicism, social trust, health, well-being, and intergroup attitudes. We address a gap in the literature by analyzing the strength and stability of the education effect associated with this diverse range of outcomes across three surveys covering the period 1986–2011, including novel latent growth analyses of the stability of the education effect within the same individuals over time. Our analyses of the British Social Attitudes Survey, British Household Panel Survey, and International Social Survey Programme indicated that the education effect was robust across these outcomes and relatively stable over time, with higher education levels being associated with higher trust and political interest, better health and well-being, and with less political cynicism and less negative intergroup attitudes. The education effect was strongest when associated with political outcomes and attitudes towards immigrants, whereas it was weakest when associated with health and well-being. Most of the education effect appears to be due to the beneficial consequences of having a university education. Our results demonstrate that this beneficial education effect is also manifested in within-individual changes, with the education effect tending to become stronger as individuals age

The conditional politics of class identity: class origins, identity, and political attitudes in comparative perspective

The sources, meaning and political implications of class identity are conditional on national context, reflecting the relative importance of cultural (status-related) versus economic (resource-related) influences on class identification. Unlike Danes, the majority of Britons continue to identify as working-class. This difference between the two societies is robust across the span of 50 years of survey data analysed. It is unrelated to national variations in inequality, reflecting instead the far larger influence of an ascriptive source of identity, class origins, in Britain compared with Denmark, where current class remains the primary influence. The two societies in turn differ in the extent to which class identity is associated with economic or cultural politics. In Denmark, working class identification is associated with endorsement of redistribution, in Britain it is associated with opposition to immigration. High levels of working-class identification in Britain therefore provide an augmented constituency for the radical right rather than the left

Does class-based campaigning work? how working class appeals attract and polarize voters

Recent elections have featured various politicians directly appealing to the working class, yet we know little about how citizens react to class appeals from candidates. We investigate this question using survey experiments conducted in the United States and Denmark. We show that symbolic class rhetoric substantially influences candidate evaluations and ultimately polarizes these evaluations across class lines. We also unpack how class appeals work and find that while they increase perceptions of representation among working class voters, they have a more limited effect on perceptions of candidates’ ideological position. Our results help explain how class affects voter decision-making and contribute to broader discussions about the role of political elites in activating social cleavages

In the eye of the beholder: What determines how people sort others into social classes?

Contrary to much conventional wisdom, this article shows that class is still used by people to sort others into groups, that this sorting is largely on the basis of income and occupation and that it occurs in conditions of both high and low income inequality. Uniquely, we use both open-ended survey questions and a factorial survey experiment to show that people from high (Britain) and low (Denmark) inequality countries are willing to define classes and they do so mainly in terms of job and income. Even though people in the two countries classify others using somewhat different class labels – with working class labels being used more frequently in Britain than in Denmark – we find a common underlying pattern to the classification. This indicates that class categorization takes place according to a strong underlying mental schema

In the eye of the beholder: What determines how people sort others into social classes?

Contrary to much conventional wisdom, this article shows that class is still used by people to sort others into groups, that this sorting is largely on the basis of income and occupation and that it occurs in conditions of both high and low income inequality. Uniquely, we use both open-ended survey questions and a factorial survey experiment to show that people from high (Britain) and low (Denmark) inequality countries are willing to define classes and they do so mainly in terms of job and income. Even though people in the two countries classify others using somewhat different class labels – with working class labels being used more frequently in Britain than in Denmark – we find a common underlying pattern to the classification. This indicates that class categorization takes place according to a strong underlying mental schema