Figure
EGP class descriptions.
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Through an analysis of the 1994 through 2016 General Social Surveys, this article demonstrates that a substantial proportion of eligible voters within the working class turned away from solid identification with either the Democratic Party or the Republican Party during the Obama presidency. Even before the 2016 election cycle commenced, conditions...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... social class, we adopt a new coding based on the 2010 US Census Occupation Classification, which is now available for most GSS respondents. The descriptions of the classes are presented in Table 1, and the rationale for the coding is based on the employment relations perspective elaborated in cross-national work on social stratification (e.g., Erikson and Goldthorpe 1992) and, used, with some variation, in the cross-national literature on class voting (see Evans 1999b). Variants of this Notes: For all detailed occupations assigned to each class, see Table A2 of Morgan (2017), which also includes sample counts for each occupation, tabulated for the three four-survey periods considered in this article: 1994-2000, 2002-2008, and 2010-2016. ...Context 2
... transition to models that utilize class as a partition of the electorate, we first offer a brief presentation of the contours of the EGP class schema during the three presidencies, as coded for the GSS. Table 2 presents in its first three columns the distribution of the classes described in Table 1 by pooling four waves of the GSS for each presidency: (1) 1994(1) , 1996(1) , 1998(1) , and 2000(2) 2000(2) , 2002(2) , 2004(2) , and 2006and (3) 2010, 2012 for Obama. The last three columns report the mean years of completed education for incumbents of these classes. ...Context 3
... models 1 through 4 suggest that class is a meaningful predictor of party identification, one that is at least as strong as education and probably stronger. Together, class and education are complementary predictors, and neither is reducible to the other (even though, as shown in Table 1, they are strongly related at the aggregate class level). ...Context 4
... pattern could be regarded as one of the first modeling results of this article: based on the AIC and BIC model fit statistics calculated for Table 3, the GSS suggests that party identification has not evolved in class-specific fashion (or, for that matter, in education-specific fashion) over the course of the last three presidencies. We will argue against this inference below using graphical depictions Notes: The sample is limited to those who have complete information for education and class, and it excludes individuals in classes IVc, VIIb, and the military (see Tables 1 and 2). The outcome is a four-category party identification variable (Democrat, Republican, another party, and independent) in which independents include leaners. ...Similar publications
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Citations
... These class categories draw on those used byMorgan and Lee (2017) based on the Erikson-Goldthorpe-Portocarero (EGP) 10-class scheme(1979). If both parents' occupations were reported, we used the "dominance" method to code for the parent with the higher EGP class.Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. ...
We look at how economically divergent siblings in the United States make sense of their economic gaps, highlighting family relationships as an arena in which economic inequalities are experienced and negotiated. Drawing on over sixty in-depth interviews with a racially diverse sample of predominantly middle-class persons who report themselves to be in better economic circumstances than their sibling(s), we examine “sibling difference stories,” or siblings’ explanatory accounts of their economic divergence. We analyze the integration of cultural discourses of inequality into these stories. Siblings deploy a meritocracy discourse of individual responsibility in conjunction with other cultural frames to make sense of economic gaps. These include “Born that Way,” emphasizing inherent differences of ability, and “Birth Order,” about how siblings of different ages experience family life differently due to their age-based location in family structure and history. The “Institutional Failures” frame, prevalent among racial minority siblings, points to the failure of social institutions and policies to provide needed supports to the sibling lagging in achievement. Black, Latino/a, and biracial informants further situate institutional failures within systemic racism. Our study’s relational approach draws attention to the role of intimacy and emotion in how people make sense of inequality.
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Quantitative sociologists frequently use simple linear functional forms to estimate associations among variables. However, there is little guidance on whether such simple functional forms correctly reflect the underlying data-generating process. Incorrect model specification can lead to misspecification bias, and a lack of scrutiny of functional forms fosters interference of researcher degrees of freedom in sociological work. In this article, I propose a framework that uses flexible machine learning (ML) methods to provide an indication of the fit potential in a dataset containing the exact same covariates as a researcher’s hypothesized model. When this ML-based fit potential strongly outperforms the researcher’s self-hypothesized functional form, it implies a lack of complexity in the latter. Advances in the field of explainable AI, like the increasingly popular Shapley values, can be used to generate understanding into the ML model such that the researcher’s original functional form can be improved accordingly. The proposed framework aims to use ML beyond solely predictive questions, helping sociologists exploit the potential of ML to identify intricate patterns in data to specify better-fitting, interpretable models. I illustrate the proposed framework using a simulation and real-world examples.
This paper examines how working-class young adults construct their political identities in the wake of the decline of mediating institutions such as stable work, unions, nuclear family structures, and religion. The transition to adulthood has become deinstitutionalized as leaving home, finishing school, finding a good job, and getting married and having children seem increasingly out of reach for contemporary young adults. In the absence of institutionalized rites of passage, respondents must create, within their constraints, the story or narrative in terms of which their lives make sense. Through in-depth interviews with young working-class residents of a declining coal town in northeastern Pennsylvania, I trace how young adults construct narratives that make connections between economic decline, emotional despair, and political realignment. While working-class young adults may inherit political beliefs from their parents, growing up in a time of economic precarity and social division has the potential to disrupt older allegiances and prompt the creation of new identities and social solidarities. I demonstrate how individual strategies for managing suffering organize the young working-class self in ways that justify disengagement from conventional politics and a turn toward self-help and conspiracy theories. I also explore differences within the sample by racial identity and gender identity, tracing how different histories of oppression and differing expectations of moral self-worth possibly contribute to the political realm.
Capitalizing on the newly available and consistent coding of detailed occupations for the General Social Surveys (GSS), this article examines the link between class origins and public support for redistribution in the United States from 1977 through 2018. The findings reveal significant net associations between class origins and preferences for redistribution. Individuals with farming-class or working-class origins are more supportive of government action to reduce inequality than individuals with salariat-class origins. These class-origin differences are associated with individuals' current socioeconomic characteristics but are not fully accounted for by these factors. In addition, individuals in more privileged class positions have increased their support for redistribution over time. Attitudes toward federal income taxes are also analyzed as an additional measure of redistribution preferences. Overall, the findings suggest a continuing role of class origin in determining support for redistribution.
For several decades, working-class employees have been forgotten by policy makers and society more generally. This notion is further exacerbated in the organizational studies literature, where research mostly focuses on professional employees. In the current study, we seek to rectify this omission by examining how the experience of working-class employees has changed over time. We use a nationally representative sample of 35,771 U.S. employees collected between 1972 and 2018 as part of the repeated cross-sections of the General Social Survey Results suggest a growing disparity between working-class and middle/upper-class employees, with working-class employees reporting lower levels of financial satisfaction and higher levels of work exhaustion compared to middle/upper-class employees. Moreover, these discrepancies have increased over time, suggesting that this population of employees has indeed been forgotten.
The General Social Survey (GSS) shows that many self-identified white adults continue to hold racial attitudes that can be regarded, collectively, as a persistent social problem. Similar to findings from the analysis of electoral surveys, the GSS also shows that these racial attitudes have more strongly predicted political behavior since 2012. However, and in contrast to group-identity interpretations of these patterns, the increase in predictive power since 2012 is attributable to a positive development: above and beyond the effects of cohort replacement, support for compensatory interventions to address black–white inequalities has increased substantially, whereas prejudice and bigotry have decreased slightly. Because these changes have been larger on the political left than on the political right, the attitudes have gained in overall predictive power.
