How Class Shapes Critical Resentment Toward Inequality: The Competing Forces of Stratification and Politics

Abstract

Some scholars see class as increasingly irrelevant in shaping opinions toward inequality, while others maintain that it endures. However, what is often problematic with research in this area is the conflation of class and status. Further, contemporary accounts of peoples’ perceptions of inequality often draw on insights from stratification or from political affiliation but do not consider the interplay between these. This article fills this gap by exploring perceptions of inequality through class, status, and political perspectives. Drawing on data from the International Social Survey Program, I investigate how class, status, and partisanship affect critical attitudes toward inequality differently. The findings reveal that social class influences how people perceive income inequality in their society and that these effects are different from that of status. Further, the results reveal the profound effect that vote choice has on the class effects toward perceptions of inequality. The evidence produced in this article casts considerable doubt on those claiming the demise of class, provides new evidence in support of the separation of social class and status in terms of perceptions of inequality, and also resonates with research on the impact of vote choice in shaping orientations toward economic and political equality.

Keywords:

• Social class
• income inequality
• Weber
• voting
• conservatism

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the editor as well as the anonymous reviewers for their comments. My appreciation should also be extended to Sylvia Fuller for providing detailed comments/suggestions on previous drafts of this article. This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding was also provided by a Killam Doctoral Scholarship. The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. ZA5890 Data file version 1.0.0, doi:10.4232/1.11911.

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Edward Haddon

Edward Haddon is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria and a member of the Department of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, Canada. His current research interests include class analysis in comparative perspective, political sociology and social inequalities.