EC - Class and Politics

Manza’s & Brooks’s “Class and Politics” evaluates the interesting debate on whether political decisions and outcomes are affected by class factors. They find that there are both individual-level mechanisms and organizational and institutional factors that influence political behavior (204). At the individual level, they claim that economic interests, social-psychological factors, and social networks are all significant things to consider when analyzing variation in class politics. I do not need to go into much depth explaining these three factors, as a previous blog post has already done so very well. Instead, I will focus on the latter part of Manza’s & Brooks’s work, which turns to look at class politics and recent trends in political participation, voting, and financing. For political participation, they find that there is “at best only modest evidence for an ‘increase’ in class divide on turnout” (212). For voting behavior, they conclude that “income-based models have found persistence of the classical alignment, with lower-income voters remaining as Democratic as before” but also that “classes have realigned politically” with more professionals aligning towards the Democratic Party (213). Although they have come to these conclusions, much of Manza’s & Brooks’s article circled around evaluating the immense amount of data supporting both sides of each argument. While doing my own survey research on class and political ideology for another class, I too found that there are mixed results. I agree that it is best that Manza & Brooks operationalized “class” in terms of occupation because much of what I discovered about political ideology had less to do with income and more to do with status – in the Weberian sense – possibly coming through their occupation.

Finally, I also agree with their claims that financing does play a heavy hand in political outcomes. Not only is there an ‘incumbency advantage’ because challengers find it difficult to garner the immense amount of money to create a formidable campaign, but there is also bias towards those who are more affluent. This solidifies the colloquial saying that “the heavenly chorus sings with an upper class accent.” In all, those with the money have the ability to have their voices heard.