Measuring Class: Improving Proxies of Class in Polling

• In Event: Conceptualizing and Measuring Social Class in the United States

Abstract

Class is underdeveloped in modern political polling. Most applied work relies on a combination of income and education as proxies for class even though a range of scholarly work has identified how income and education can miss important aspects of class. In this paper we explore this issue using a survey of American voters and a block of questions related to particular aspects of their occupation to explore how we might better identify class in the American context. To test this we compare our results to more traditional measures of class used in political science, sociology and psychology. In addition we examine how different measures of class relate to voting preferences and ideological disposition.

Authors

• Sean McElwee, Demos

• Kevin Reuning, Miami University