Class Flashcards
Class
Heath et al (2009)
Findings
What is Social class
- First, in all years, there is a definite gradient with respondents from salariat origins being much less likely to define themselves as working class than are respondents from the skilled or semi-/unskilled classes. Family background is persistently associated with current class identity
- However, the gap between people from salariat and working-class origins has shrunk over time, down from a 50-percentage point difference in 1964 to a 34-point difference in 2005. It seems that family background makes rather less difference than it once did. Still, the change is hardly on a revolutionary scale – less than half a point change each year.
- when we took this into account in a multivariate analysis – and also took into account the possibility that the relationship between objective and subjective class may differ between men and women – we found that there was no consistent evidence that the relationship between subjective class and either father’s class or respondent’s class has weakened
- In 1963, over half of the sample said that they thought that middle-class people were ones with white-collar (or similar) jobs, while two-thirds said that they thought working-class people were ones with blue-collar (or similar) jobs. In 2005, the type of occupation someone was in remained the primary characteristic associated with class membership, but the proportion linking occupation with class was around fifteen points below what it had been 40 years earlier. Meanwhile, there was a clear increase in the proportion who associated class with income differences between rich and poor. However, even in 2005, income clearly took second place behind occupation as a marker of class position in the eyes of our respondents.
Class
Evans and Graaf
What is Social Class
- Use the Erikson-Goldthorpe measure
- The schema categorizes people by occupation into upper service (higher professional and managerial workers), lower service (lower professional and managerial workers), routine non-manual, petty bourgeois (the self-employed, small businessmen and farmers), foremen and supervisors, skilled manual, and semi/unskilled manual workers (including agricultural workers).
- We use the schema rather than, for example, a manual/non-manual dichotomy because, as has been frequently established, such crude indicators do not allow important effects of variations in class position within the manual and non-manual categories to be measured—the most obvious example being self-employed (‘petty bourgeois’) manual workers
Class
Evans and Graaf (2013)
What is Class Voting and Why does it Occure
Political Choice Thesis: At any given point in time, the class–party choice association is assumed to be explainable via voters’ positions on a dimension of ‘economic left-right ideology’. In other words, class differences in left-right party preference derive from differences between classes in support for, and opposition to, redistribution and the operation of the free market. People in different classes have different sets of resources, opportunities, and vulnerabilities: in short, life-chances. This predisposes them to prefer more or less right-wing and left-wing parties.
Class
Jansen, Evans, and Graaf (2013)
What is Class Voting and Why does it Occur?
Class continues to have an impact on party choice in most countries and, despite the decline of the magnitude of differences, the order in which classes favour left or right parties for the most part endures: across the forty-five-year period the self-employed are the most different from the manual working class, followed by the service class and the routine non-manual class.
Class
Heath, Curtis, and Elgenius (2009)
Data/Methodology
(How) has class voting changed overtime?
Series of British Election Surveys (BES), which have been conducted after every general election since 1964 and the 2005 British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey. Both of which include a number of questions of class.
Class
Heath, Curtis, and Elgenius (2009)
Findings (How has class identification changed)
(How) has class voting changed overtime?
- There has not been any move away from class identity generally or from unprompted class identity in particular: In 1964 only a little under half the respondents declared unprompted that they were either middle or working class, and the position was much the same in 2005.
- The balance between those calling themselves ‘middle class’ and those claiming to be ‘working class’ has changed: In 1964, for every person calling themselves middle class there were over two who said they were working class and in 2005 the ratio was closer to 2:3
- Small change in number who report feeling close to their class: In 1963, rather more than half of each class felt close to their class, but by 2005, this proportion had fallen, in both classes, to around two fifths.
Class
Heath, Curtis, and Elgenius (2009)
Findings (How has class voting changed)
(How) has class voting changed overtime?
- There has been a convergence between the classes in support for Labour: The gap in support for labour between unprompted middle- and working-class identifiers declines (albeit very unevenly) from 49 percentage points in 1964 to a meagre 13 points in 2005. However, this gap does not shrink at all during the 22 years between 1970 and 1992 and falls by a further 24 points in the 13 years to 2005.
- The gap between prompted working- and middle-class identifiers has also sharply declined: This had consistently been around 20 points from 1964 to 1997 but collapsed suddenly to six points in 2005.
Class
Jansen, Evans, and Graaf (2013)
Findings
(How) has class voting changed overtime?
- For the routine non-manual class, the service class, and the self-employed the odds of voting for a right-wing party, when compared with those for the manual working class, have decreased over the last four decades: class voting has converged over time.
- Although there seems to be a general pattern of decline, the plotted country figures show that the process is not gradual in nature for many of the countries we examined. The large majority of the variation in the strength of class voting is not associated with linear decline.
Class
Best (2011)
Findings
(How) has class voting changed overtime?
Manual workers contributed a low percentage of support to social democratic vote shares at the beginning of the series, and they have become noticeably less relevant over time. Across all countries, the manual worker contribution to social democratic parties has declined significantly since the 1970s, particularly in Italy and the Netherlands. While manual workers gave between 5% and 16% of the national vote to social democratic parties in the 1970s, these results suggest that they contributed even less to social democratic vote shares in subsequent decades. Social democratic parties appear to have lost a good deal of the vote share they received from manual workers in the past
Class
Evans and Graaf (2013)
Explanation of Arguments
Why Has Class Voting Changed Overtime
- The most influential perspective - popular among both sociologists and political scientists—holds that political cleavages are shaped ‘bottom up’; social divisions derived from different locations in occupational, religious, ethnic or linguistic structures are argued to influence political interests, values and party preferences. Recent changes in the social bases of politics are thought likely to derive from processes of economic development and secularization leading to the emergence of less structured societies. Increased social mobility, affluence and educational expansion are assumed to weaken the distinctiveness of classes
- The second perspective emphasizes how the political elite influence social cleavages. It is usually thought of as the ‘top down’ approach to the structuring of political cleavages. The extent of social divisions in political preferences derives from political actors and their strategic positioning along dimensions of ideology or values. Where voters are responsive to the programmes offered by parties, rather than simply voting on the basis of habit or long-term party attachment, party polarization on relevant ideological dimensions should increase the magnitude of the association between social position and party choice; party convergence should reduce it. This occurs because when there is ideological convergence the strength of the signals from parties to voters are weakened and the motivation for choosing parties on interest/value grounds derived from class or religion is reduced, and vice versa.
- However the two explanations do not necessarily present stark alternatives: there is probably a process of mutual interaction;
Class
Heath, Curtis, Elgenius (2009)
Argument
Why Has Class Voting Changed Overtime - Top-down explanation
In every case where change has happened it accelerated during the era of New Labour. Rather than simply reflecting autonomous changes in the nature of society, it seems that the declining force of class identity as a normative reference group is best accounted for by political developments, and in particular by New Labour’s move from 1994 onwards to a less class-conscious center ground.
Class
Evans and Tilley (2017)
Argument
Why Has Class Voting Changed Overtime - Top-down explanation
- People (in the UK) now see the main parties as more similar in terms of policy, elites, and which class they represent; specifically, the Labour party has become more like the conservatives. This is because the main parties now cover a far less extensive ideological range, in both manifestos and party speeches group appeals to voters have changed, and politicians are now drawn from a similar pool of highly educated upper-middle class people.
- These views of parties are stubbornly held and it takes a shock to change them. In Britain in the 1990s there was such a shock. Labour radically changed its nature in a short space of time and crucially made this very obvious to the electorate.
Class
Evans and Tilley (2017)
Ideology/Policy Convergence
Why Has Class Voting Changed Overtime - Top-down explanation
They analyse the party manifestos using coded policy content collected by the Manifesto Project on Political Representation (MARPOR).
* They find that policy divisions between the parties collapsed during the 1990s and did not reappear, the most dramatic shift in Labour’s position taking place between 1992 and 2001.
They also use a set of ‘expert surveys’ conducted over the period 1982–2010. These surveys are undertaken within the community of academics who study British politics. They are asked to score parties on a wide range of policy scales. These answers can then be used to assess party positions on the left–right dimension.
* Again, we see a particularly pronounced policy convergence in British politics during the 1990s. There is a sharp tightening of the gap between Labour and the Conservatives at the time of the 1997 election. The move by Labour to a more centrist position, combined with a general re-branding of its image, appears to have been a one-step change. There has been some evidence of divergence since, but it is far less pronounced.
Class
Evans and Tilley (2017)
Changing Appeals to Voters
Why Has Class Voting Changed Overtime - Top-down explanation
To examine the use of class appeals, they code the use of terms that can be reasonably thought as representing the working class.
* Over time, Labour’s manifesto references to workers clearly decline. This change is most dramatic during the elections between 1987 and 2001. For the hand-coded data, the percentage of Labour class appeals referring to the working class falls from an average of just over 15 per cent in the 1970s and 1980s, to just 3 per cent from 1997 onwards.
* Labour used to appeal regularly to the working class and it has stopped doing so to such a degree that there is now essentially no difference between the two parties
* References to ‘class neutral’ notions of family and parenthood have increased dramatically for both parties (they nowadays constitute approximately 30 per cent of all references for both parties).
To examine leaders’ speeches, we use the same coding procedure as we used for the manifestos; they tell pretty much the same story.
Class
Evans and Tilley (2017)
Background of MPs
Why Has Class Voting Changed Overtime - Top-down explanation
- Signals can be sent by the things politicians and parties say and do, but they can also be sent by the background of politicians themselves.
- For Labour, politicians from working class backgrounds traditionally played prominent roles but this has changed over time; whereas half of the 1945 Labour cabinet had previously held working class jobs, when Labour entered office in 1997 there was just one cabinet minister who previously had a working-class occupation
To examine more detailed information about MPs we can use evidence from the Parliamentary Candidates UK Dataset.
* This shows that while around 10 per cent of Labour MPs were previously union officials from the 1950s to the 1980s, by 2015 only 1 per cent of Labour MPs had worked for a trade union. The opposite story is the case for university education. Among Labour MPs in 1959 only 41 per cent had a university education, compared with around 80 per cent by 2010. The gap between Labour and Conservative MPs in university education has now been completely closed.
* Conservative MPs have become noticeably less likely to have attended a private school, and Labour MPs have changed little in this respect. Similarly, Conservative MPs have become less likely to have attended Oxford or Cambridge, while Labour MPs have become more likely to have done so.
