L&C Class and Politics, Reading for June 28th

Although social inequality is appeared in diverse aspects of a society, among them, political process reveals social inequality in terms of different classes or policy of certain country through enacting certain “eligibility” that gives disadvantage to certain group of people’s participation for political process. (210) According to “Class and Politics” of Manza and Brooks, political process of a society is differently constituted according to different affects of each class because each class has different ability and goal about participating political process. (201) Thus, in this process, certain group of people has prior place to influence to political process against other groups by reflecting inequality. This process is represented as “political outcome.” (208) The division of class in political process isn’t ignorable problem. Although each class is weakly separated in U.S. when they vote, “political participation” is differently characterized as each class behaves according to different concerns such as “income, wealth, education, occupation.” (202, 203) Among these interests of diverse classes, especially occupation can be an important factor to show different political interests because according to how atmosphere of workplace is constituted, people can establish different political concerns and groups such as “unions, professional associations, business associations, and so forth.” (204) Thus, occupation can be an important factor to establish how each people belong to certain political class.

In addition, in that belonging, according to “individual-level perspective”, such as “economic interests, social-psychological factors, and social networks,” different political behaviors can be established by constituting different political class. This is a micro perspective of political process. (204) As well as this micro perspective, there is also macro perspective that significantly considers “organizational and institutional context” like “unions and business associations.” (207) By different classes formed by different organizational context, different political behaviors can be made. Eventually, inequality in political process is caused by classes that have different interests and strength and favorable treatment of the government policy for certain class, and this inequality is important indicator how U.S. political process is unjustly performed by being not reducing the gap between influences of different classes.