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Class and social policy in the knowledge economy

Häusermann, Silja; Pinggera, Michael; Ares, Macarena; Enggist, Matthias (2022). Class and social policy in the knowledge economy. European Journal of Political Research, 61(2):462-484.

Abstract

Recent studies of welfare state attitudes in the knowledge economy find very high generalized support for generous welfare state policies, both among the working and the middle classes. Has class become irrelevant as a predictor of social policy preferences? Or do we simply mis-conceptualise today's class conflict over social policy? To what extent has it changed from a divide over the level of social policy generosity to a divide over the kind of social policy and – more specifically – over the relative importance that should be given to different social policies? Answering these questions is not only relevant to understand welfare politics in the twenty-first century, but electoral politics as well: only when we understand what working- and middle-class voters care about, can we evaluate the role distributive policies play in electoral processes. We use original survey data from eight West European countries to show that middle- and working-class respondents indeed differ in the relative importance they attribute to social investment and social consumption policies. Middle-class respondents consistently attribute higher absolute and relative importance to social investment. We also show that this emphasis on investive policies relates to the middle class expecting better future economic and social opportunities than the working class. This divide in anticipated opportunities underlies a new kind of working- versus middle-class divide, which contributes to transforming the class divide from a conflict over the level of social policy to a conflict over the priorities of social policy.

Additional indexing

Item Type:Journal Article, refereed, original work
Communities & Collections:06 Faculty of Arts > Institute of Political Science
Dewey Decimal Classification:320 Political science
Scopus Subject Areas:Social Sciences & Humanities > Sociology and Political Science
Uncontrolled Keywords:sociology and political science class, social policy, knowledge economy
Language:English
Date:1 May 2022
Deposited On:07 Dec 2021 13:42
Last Modified:26 Oct 2024 01:39
Publisher:Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, Inc.
ISSN:0304-4130
OA Status:Closed
Publisher DOI:https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12463

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