Political Engagement and Relative Social Position among the Elite in Britain

• In Event: 594 - Section on Political Sociology Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 03. Civic Engagement

Abstract

In this paper, I utilize a novel data source to examine differences in political engagement among an elite segment of the British population: college-educated, non-routine workers making over £100,000 a year. The data come from the Great British Class Survey (GBCS), an online survey sponsored by the BBC whose 160,000 respondents were overwhelmingly well-off and well-educated. Although this sample skew presents some problems for statistical inference, it provides a great opportunity for examining differences among the most-privileged Britons in great detail: where most representative surveys might have only 2 or 3 respondents this economically and educationally privileged, there are close to 10,000 in the GBCS. I make use of this over-representation of the well-off in an analysis of political efficacy and contacting of government officials; I show that even though everyone in this group ought to have more than sufficient skills and resources for political engagement, there are still substantial differences by social position. Specifically, post-graduate degrees and higher incomes still differentiate political engagement, and cultural and social capital (as indicated by types of schools attended, cultural activities practiced, and the occupations people report knowing) differentiate elite political engagement even more strongly. This indicates that social position qua social position—that is, connection to dominant and legitimated ways of being—matters as much as or more than costs and resources for facilitating political involvement.

Author

• Daniel Laurison, University of California-Berkeley