Is our political system fair?
Quite a lot of people believe that, in a country like the UK, the system is meritocratic, which means that the success of a person is solely based their efforts and abilities. Unfortunately, this is far from the reality. Many factors influence someone’s life, for example their race, their gender, and their class. It influences so much, starting with how you are perceived by society, your experiences and world view to your decisions in daily life. Even, or should I say, especially when it comes to politics, all these features make a difference. In this blog, I focus political engagement and socioeconomic inequalities, also looking at what part education plays and how those inequalities could be tackled.
So let’s dive right in!
As just introduced, socioeconomic factors play a big role in politics: whether these are happening in the forms of voting, campaigning, or being representative.
Figure 1. Estimated turnout of voters in the 2019 election
The graph in Figure 1 shows the turnout of the 2019 Election in the UK, sorted by class (IPSOS, 2019).
The Bar ‘AB’ shows the group of people with a higher, as well as intermediate administrative, and managerial professional occupation. ‘C1’ refers to clerical and junior managerial, administrative, supervisory, professional occupation. People with skilled manual occupations are categorised in ‘C2’ and ‘DE’ includes semi- and unskilled manual occupations, as well as unemployed people. ‘DE’ is the lowest class of occupations (IPSOS, 2009). This figure depicts that the higher the class, the more likely they are to vote. Between the highest-class group (AB) and the lowest one (DE) is a difference of 15%.
The problem arising is that if not all groups of a society are participating equally, it is not fully democratic. Because less people from the lower classes vote, this could lead to not making decisions in their interest, as someone in the highest class has most likely other priorities than someone from a lower. But we do need to acknowledge that it is not only the voting citizens that are underrepresented. The following graph depicts occupation of MPs, who were elected in 2017 and 2019 (Campbell and Hudson, 2018, cited in Cracknell and Tunnicliffe, 2022).
Figure 2: occupation of newly elected MPs in 2017 and 2019
Let’s focus on 2019: While the largest percentage by far for all parties was instrumental, it is interesting to look at the Manual occupational. If you are wondering why you can’t find anything although the section is highlighted – that is because there is nothing. None of the newly elected MPs came from manual occupations. Moreover, no party had more than 11% of their MPs in group ‘Other’, including NHS or Social Worker.
Although it is not clear if politicians’ occupational class have an effect on their politics, it is often assumed, as the interests of lower classes differ from those of the highest earning classes (Heath, 2013). This, as well as the fact that many do not advocate for fairness and equal chances, a lot of working-class citizens feel ignored and forgotten.
How do we tackle this issue?
We start at the root – the education system in schools.
Children learn from their parents and families – one way or another. They might not be directly told by their parents ‘not to vote, as it does not matter anyway’, but children learn a lot from watching the people they raised. Political apathy is in correlation with social class and can be passed on from parents to their children (Brady et al., 2015; Hoskins et al., 2017). Sloam et al. (2021) found in their research that higher education is already a significant increasing factor for someone’s political participation. This helps us to understand that we need to work on the issue even earlier – school.
Research that has proven that the political engagement increases when doing political activities in schools (Hoskins et al. 2017). Now don’t be fooled – it was also shown that although the overall levels increased, the gap between the classes did not improve. There is a lot more to be aware of.
Most of us would agree that a lot of the things we learned in school were irrelevant for the lives we now live. Sure, everyone needs to be able to do a little bit of maths, maybe speaking another language and a bit more. But what I have often heard was the complaint that school did not teach us enough valuable life skills. Of course, there are many needed skills, but I would argue that understanding and being able to participate in a democracy is pretty important.
Now I was lucky enough to grow up in a home, where I was taught exactly those skills, where my opinion mattered and my voice was heard, even from a young age. I knew about how democracy works and all the big events happening in life. However, many children did not share my privilege.
And for exactly those kids we need more and better political subjects in school that teach everybody about the importance of participating. The subject Citizenship Education was introduced in schools in 2002 and has been statutory since then (Weinberg, 2021), which definitely was a good start. However, the inequalities are still severe, and it is so important for us to improve these.
It does not only have to be a subject in school, many children find it easier to learn while doing something. School councils and parliaments are a great opportunity to get children involved. Another option are mock elections. This way, not only will there be interesting data, children will learn how it works and feel more certain when they are legally allowed to vote.
Some schools have already included these ideas, but by far not all. Because some schools are located in wealthier areas, it is a often easier for them to find the resources, time and necessary staff than for schools in very low-income areas. To let this not effect political teaching, it is important to make these adaptions compulsory for every school and fund it with as much money as needed!
It should not be a matter of class and money whether schools can afford this. These changes are necessary, and it is absolutely important to make sure every child has many different forms of political education!
And let’s be honest – there is always money the state can use; they just chose it for other things. But what could be more important than fighting for political equality for all classes?
Because democracy should never be a matter of class!
Bibliography:
Brady, H.E., Lehman Schlozman, K., and Verba, S. (2015) Political Mobility and Political Reproduction from Generation to Generation, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 657(1), pp. 149-173. Doi: 10.1177/0002716214550587.
Cracknell, R. and Tunnicliffe, T. (2022) Social background of MPs 1979-2019. Available at: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7483/ (Accessed: 22 March 2022).
Heath, O. (2013) Policy Representation, Social Representation and Class Voting in Britain, British Journal of Political Science, 45(1), pp. 173-193. Doi: 10.1017/S0007123413000318.
Hoskins, B., Germen 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. Doi: 10.1016/j.ssresearch.2017.09.001.
IPSOS (2009) Social Grade – A Classification Tool. Available at: https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/social-grade (Accessed: 21 March 2022).
IPSOS MORI (2019) How the voters voted in the 2019 election. Available at: https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2019-election (Accessed: 21 March 2022).
Sloam, J., Kisby, B., Henn, M., and Oldfield, B. (2021) Voice, Equality and Education: The Role of Higher Education in Defining the Political Participation of Young Europeans, Comparative European Politics, 19, pp. 296-322. Doi: 10.1057/s41295-020-00228-z.
Weinberg, J. (2021) The Missing Link: an updated evaluation of the provision, practice and politics of democratic education in english secondary schools. Project Report for the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Political Literacy. London: United Kingdom.