The working class left behind? The class gap in life satisfaction in Germany and Switzerland over the last decades

ABSTRACT

The 1990s and 2000s were a gloomy period for Germany’s working class, hit by mass unemployment, welfare retrenchment and wage stagnation. We examine whether the growing economic disparity between the top and the bottom of Germany’s class structure was accompanied by a widening class gap in life satisfaction. We analyse whether there is a social class gradient in life satisfaction and whether, over the last decades, this class gradient increased in Germany, relative to the comparison case of Switzerland. We use panel data for Germany (1984–2014) and Switzerland (2000–2015) and check the robustness of our results by replicating our analysis with the pooled German and Swiss samples of the European Social Survey (2002–2014). In both countries, respondents in higher classes report substantially higher life satisfaction than those in lower classes. The class gap is twice as large in Germany than in Switzerland. In Germany, the class gap in life satisfaction narrowed between 1984 and 1990, strongly widened between 1990 and 2005 and then decreased again after 2010. In Switzerland, the class gap did not follow a clear time trend, but remained basically constant. In Germany, differences in unemployment risks and household income account for half of the class gap and its evolution over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Life satisfaction
• social class
• unemployment
• Germany
• Switzerland
• income inequality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Oliver Lipps is head of the methodological research programme at the Swiss Centre of Expertise in Social Sciences, FORS, Lausanne, and member of the Swiss Household Panel team. In addition, he is lecturer in survey methodology and survey research at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Bern. He has published widely on issues of survey data quality and substantive issues such as subjective well-being.

Daniel Oesch is Professor at the Life Course and Inequality Research Centre (LINES) at the University of Lausanne. His research focuses on social stratification and inequality, unemployment and labour market policy. He has published widely in the field of economic sociology and is the author of two books: Occupational Change in Europe (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Redrawing the Class Map (Palgrave MacMillan, 2006).

Notes

1 For more detail on the concept and measurement of the class variable, see Oesch (2006). The script used for the construction of this class schema can be downloaded in Stata or SPSS from one of the authors’ webpage: http://people.unil.ch/danieloesch/.

2 Although the relevant political unity at Switzerland's subnational level is the canton, our yearly samples are too small to provide a sufficient number of observations for each of the 26 cantons that vary widely in size. Instead, we use the more aggregate level of Switzerland's seven great regions.

3 In order to reduce the influence of short-term fluctuations and to better grasp the time trend, we use weighted scatterplot smoothing (LOWESS). This means that we compute the mean life satisfaction in a given year by borrowing additional information from adjacent years, where nearest neighbouring years get higher weights and more distant years lower weights. This provides us with a line across years which best fits the data, but without imposing a functional form. Note that for these descriptive results, we also use the cross-sectional weights provided by SOEP and SHP.