People and Politics Worldwide

Class and Other Forms of Social Stratification

Why Class Matters in Politics

Social Stratification

Strata, stratification

Political Saliency

salient

Forms of Social Stratification with Political Saliency:

Geography

region

rural/urban

Religion

Ethnicity/Race

Gender

Caste

Class

Definitions of class

Marxist Definition of Class

Class as operationalized in the Times’ series

What measure do they use?

Occupation

Income

Education

Wealth

Occcupation

Status, prestige, hierarchy

High status, middle, low status occupations

Income

Correlates with status prestige of occupations, but not exactly

What professions are higher prestige than earning power?

What professions are lower prestige than earning power?

Education

Also correlates with prestige and income, but not totally

e.g. can you think of professions requiring a lot of education but not high in prestige or earning power? Or those that don’t require a lot of education but that have high prestige or earnings?

Wealth

What’s the difference between income and wealth?

“net worth”

**In your opinion, how well do these measure approximate the concept of social class?

How consistently do the Times articles use the concept, describe how it functions in American society today?

What other kinds of indicators of class do the articles mention?

Class as consumption?

Class as power?

Class as freedom?

Do you agree that Americans are uncomfortable talking about class, thinking about society in terms of class divisions, politics as a clash of class-based interests?

Why are Americans this way?

Class Voyeurism

Class and Culture Article

How Political Scientists Operationalize Class

Socio-Economic Status (SES)

SES model of political participation

Verba and Nie. 1972. Participation in America: Political democracy and social equality. New York: Harper and Row.

Kinds of political participation

How/why does SES affect political participation?

Brady, Verba and Schlozman. 1995. “Beyond SES: A Resource Model of Political Participation.” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 89, No. 2 (Jun., 1995), pp. 271-294.

What kind of resources determine political participation?

Civic skills – such as?

Time

Money

This is why CLASS MATTERS for political participation

Because people of different classes have different levels/amounts of these

Skills, time, money

Compensating factors???

IDENTITY – strong sense of, e.g., national identity/nationalism, ethnic identification, gender identification, class identification

What are we going to use the concept of class in this course?

You are going to research class in one of the countries we study

UK, Russia, Mexico, China, India, Egypt, South Africa

What are the salient classes, class distinctions in your country?

Find data on occupation, income, education, wealth, people employed in various sectors of the economy

Historically powerful classes, history/present political struggle of the less powerful classes

How class, class divisions have animated politics in your country historically, today

Are class divisions visible in the party system?

What party represents which classes?

Who rules?