The precarious: how American voters view the working class

ABSTRACT

The idea of the working class is often employed in political dialogue, yet its definitions are fraught. Working class has been identified with occupation, education, income or self-identification. We argue that economic precarity is an important aspect of working class status that is often not directly captured by other measures. We find that when asked, voters often suggest precarity as a defining characteristic of working class in the United States. Next, we show that high levels of economic precarity predict self-identifying as liberal, a Democrat, and disapproving of President Donald Trump even while controlling for an individual’s race, gender, age, education and income. We also find that precarity has a persistent effect for white and non-white voters. Overall, we show that by ignoring precarity as an aspect of the working class, researchers are missing important aspects of how working class status is conceived in the United States.

KEYWORDS:

• Working class
• social identity
• stereotypes
• American politics
• open-ended surveys

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Only one of the authors participated in the coding of the comments. They started by reading a random sample of 100 to identify potential themes, using the themes identified from this they continued coding the remaining sample.

2 The full text of the precarity battery is available in the supplementary material.

3 We use a logistic link to connect our latent variable to the observed indicators. Everything besides Cash Checking is coded with No as a 1 and a Yes as a 0, and Cash Checking follows the opposite. Models are estimated using Stan with 2 chains and 2000 iterations (Carpenter et al. 2017).

4 Party identification is measured on a seven point scale from Strong Democrat to Strong Republican, ideology is measured on a 5 point scale (Very Liberal, Liberal, Moderate, Conservative, Very Conservative), and presidential approval is measured on a 5 point scale (Strongly Disapprove, Somewhat Disapprove, Neither Approve nor Disapprove, Somewhat Approve, Strongly Approve).

5 Employment type is a statistically significant predictor for approval for President Trump. In all other cases the working class variables are not statistically significant.

6 Weights were estimated by YouGov using the American Community Survey, Current Population Survey, and the Census Voter Supplement as a target. Age, gender, education, race and their interaction are used to generate weights using entropy balancing. In the supplementary material we replicate these results without using weights and find the substantive relationships generally are the same, except in the case of precarity on the full ideology. The coefficient slightly diminishes and the p-value is 0.093 now.