How aspects of social classi influence partisan choice

Abstract

The only consensus formed about social class is that there’s no consensus about how it should be defined. Sociologists define social classes by occupational coding schemes (Lindh and McCall 2020). Economists and some political scientists distinguish social classes by household income (Gilens 2012; Piketty 2017), whereas most political scientists use educational attainment as a proxy for social class (Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck, 2018). But despite scholars within and across all these fields acknowledging that their favored measure of social class is a proxy, and that social class is more than a sum of is economic parts, the socio-cultural aspects of class are rarely included in models predicting public opinion. The motivation behind my dissertation is to show how broadening and systematizing our conceptualization of social class to include wealth and cultural capital will better aid us in the study of public opinion.