SOC433H5 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Populism, Rela
1
Noam Gidron and Peter A. Hall. 2017. “The Politics of Social Status: Economic and Cultural Roots
of the Populist Right.” British Journal of Sociology. 68, S1: S57-S84.
• Increased support for the populist right
• Populism: support for the concerns of common people
• status anxiety as a proximate factor inducing support for populism, and economic and cultural
developments as factors that combine to precipitate such anxiety.
• lower levels of subjective social status are associated with support for right populist parties,
identify a set of economic and cultural developments likely to have depressed the social status of
men without a college education, and show that the relative social status of those men has
declined since 1987 in many of the developed democracies.
• tatus effects provide one pathway through which economic and cultural developments may
combine to increase support for the populist right.
• electoral support for right-wing populism has a common fea- ture: at its core lie key segments of
the white male working class
• right wing populism is rooted in both economic and cultural developments, including economic
changes that have depressed the income or job security of some segments of the population and
shifts in the cultural frameworks that people use to interpret society and their place within it.
• the attitudes of people who voted for right-wing populist causes or candidates reflect deep
concerns about both their economic situation and recent cultural developments.
• supporters of Brexit tended to be much more pessimistic about their own economic prospects and
more hostile to cultural outlooks of growing prominence in mainstream culture
• Support for parties on the political left, in particular, was rooted in this intersection between
economic circumstances and cultural frameworks that defined the working class
• people who see them- selves as economically-underprivileged also tend to feel culturally-distant
from the dominant groups in society and to envision that distance in oppositional terms, which
lend themselves to quintessential populist appeals
• the weakness of support for right populism in large metropolitan centres may reflect, not only
relative prosperity, but the extent to which the experience of life within big cities promotes
distinctive cultural outlooks.
Status based theoretical perspective
• The share of votes secured by right populist parties has increased sub- stantially in the developed
democracies over the past three decades,
• notably strong at lower levels of the income and occupational hierarchies,
• Economic disadvantage is almost certainly an important driver of such support.
• At the same time, parties on the populist right have moved their economic platforms to the left,
making them more plausible providers of jobs and social protection
• many parties have put more emphasis on identity or values issues, which often draw middle-class
voters to the left but working-class voters to the right
• social status – understood as a person’s position within a hierarchy of social prestige
• the quality of a person’s occupation and level of income or education usually confer status,
• objective social status’ depends on ‘widely shared beliefs about the social categories or “types” of
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
