Blog 2 Inequalities and Political Engagement:
In the follow up from my previous blog, in this blog I will be discussing the correlations between social class and political engagement, with my focus being on voting. This means I will be trying find the reasons for why there is a gap when it comes to social class and political engagement. Understanding why there is a difference in voter turnout, can lead to ensuring that those of all social classes have a chance to have their say and feel represented.
To help understand the correlations of social class and political engagement, we first must understand what social class means. A social class is a status group that an individual belongs to (Sociology Guide, 2017). Different statuses in a society are created by individuals who engage in different activities and attempt to attain different vocations, this has led to multiple social classes, that traditionally being upper, middle and working class. Defining someone’s class can be done by looking at certain factors that are attributed to a social class. For example, Ipsos MORI (2009) found that social class can be divided into social grades, and rather than there being three distinctions, they can be divvied up into 6 social grades. Looking at the table below (Fig. 1), you can see that class cannot be grouped vaguely, with the more social grades, this provides more reasons as to why there are inequalities in political engagement.
Fig.1: Table showing the classes in the United Kingdom
Using the social classes in fig.1 above, fig.2 shows the turnout for the 2015 general election by social class. Inequalities in political engagement according to age and socioeconomic background are an increasingly important issue within the UK (Hoskins and Janmaat 2014). In the 2015 UK general election there was an approximate 20% difference in voter turnout between the highest and lowest socio-economic groups (Ipsos Mori, 2015). Looking at the graph we can decipher that those from the social grade C2 and DE are less likely to vote than those in the social grade of AB and C1. (Ipsos MORI 2015). What this shows is that during the 2015 election, those who are in higher social grades had a much better turnout.
Fig. 2: graph showing the 2015 general election turnouts by social class.
In order to create change, we would have to look into why those in lower social grades are not voting as much as those in higher social grades. We can understand social inequalities by using Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990), looking at factors such as parental education and cultural artefacts can be used as a purpose of measurement. Social inequalities affect both the level of political engagement of parents and that of their children (Brady et al., 2015). This links to Laurison’s (2015) point, where it could be argued that those in the lower classes ‘don’t know’ much about politics and believe their opinion is inferior to others. This mindset prevents them from attempting to politically engage in conversations concerning political issues. This creates a circle of disregard towards socioeconomic issues, as a comfort zone for discussing political matters hasn’t been created.
Kahne and Middaugh (2008) believe that the issue of access to learning opportunities can be viewed as a reason for lower grade individuals not being politically engaged. Looking at citizen education in schools, in can be argued that the implementation of it in the national curriculum could be ambiguous (Andrews and Mycock, 2007). Citizenship education’s level of importance from the view of the head teacher may influence how a student may gain political knowledge (Hoskins, Janmaat and Melis, 2017), the reported low value placed on citizenship education by teachers, parents and students alike (Burton et al., 2015) would suggest there is little pressure on students to engage with the subject.
Looking at fig.1 again, If I was to put my household into a social grade, it would be placed into the C1 category. From personal experience, I would say that in my household there was no main interest to engage politically, living with a single parent mother who has consistently worked in administration. Unless something eye-catching was in the news, politics is a rare topic of conversation, an example of this would be the recent EU referendum and general election held in 2017. That was the only time I truly feel I had any in depth conversations about politics, as we would speak about what we believed in and who we would vote for.
To conclude, social classes effect on politics has always been apparent and this means that an individual’s social group influences how they politically engage. With no intent of importance towards political education in the home or during educational periods, this means those in lower social groups are less likely to vote or take in interest in politics. In order to get them to engage, it would be key to make those in lower social grades feel as if their views are valid, this could lead to future inclusion and higher turnouts in future elections.
Bibliography
- Andrews, A. Mycock (2007) Citizenship education in the UK: divergence within a multi-national state Citizsh. Teach. Learn., 3 (1) (2007), pp. 73-88
- Bourdieu, J.C. Passeron (1990) Reproduction in education, Society and Culture4, Sage (1990)
H.E. Brady, K.L. Schlozman, S. Verba (2015) Political mobility and political reproduction from generation to generation. Ann. Am. Acad. Political Soc. Sci., 657 (1) (2015), pp. 149-173
Hoskins, B., Janmaat, J. and Melis, G. (2017). Tackling inequalities in political socialisation: A systematic analysis of access to and mitigation effects of learning citizenship at school. Social Science Research, 68, pp.88-101.
Ipsos MORI. (2009). Social Grade: A Classification Tool. Available: https://www.ipsos-mori.com/DownloadPublication/1285_MediaCT_thoughtpiece_Social_Grade_July09_V3_WEB.pdf. [ Accessed 4th March 2018].
Ipsos MORI. (2015). How Britain Voted in 2015. Available: https://www.ipsos.com/ipsos-mori/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2015?view=wide. [ Accessed 4th March 2018].
J.G. Janmaat, T. Mostafa, B. Hoskins (2014).Widening the participation gap: the effect of educational track on reported voting in England. Adolesc., 37 (2014), pp. 473-482
- Kahne, E. Middaugh (2008) Democracy for Some: the Civic Opportunity Gap in High School (Working Paper No. 59). The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, College Park, MD (2008, February)
Laurison, D. (2015). The Willingness to State an Opinion: Inequality, Don’t Know Responses, and Political Participation. Sociological Forum. 30 (4), 925-949. Available: https://capitadiscovery.co.uk/roehampton/items/eds/aph/111472108?query=class+inequalities+in+political+engagement&resultsUri=items%3Fquery%3Dclass%2Binequalities%2Bin%2Bpolitical%2Bengagement%26target%3Deds%26facet%255B0%255D%3Dfulltext%253Ayes&facet%5B0%5D=fulltext%3Ayes&target=eds. Last accessed 3rd March 2017.
Sociology Guide. (2017). Challenges to Traditional Class Analysis. Available: http://www.sociologyguide.com/social-stratification/Characteristics-of-Social-Class.php. Last accessed 3rd March 2017.