Measuring objective and subjective class: the effects of survey questionnaires on the study of class voting

ABSTRACT Despite its crucial role for social scientists, the concept of social class remains elusive and its measurement inconsistent. Building on the class voting literature, this study presents an updated assessment of the explanatory power of vote of objective class indicators (occupation, income and education) and subjective class measures. To do so, it uses three class schemes commonly used in survey questionnaires: two of them refer to the lowest categories as ‘lower’ or ‘working’ class alternatively, while the third one uses a numerical scale. This article scrutinizes (a) the link between objective indicators and subjective class, (b) the association between the two sets of measures and voting behaviour and ideology and (c) the influence of different subjective class measurements on the results. Based on an experimental survey fielded in Catalonia, the results show that different subjective class schemes result in substantially different distributions of class identities. Despite these differences, all subjective class measures appear to be more robustly associated with political preferences and behaviour than objective indicators. Once subjective class is controlled for, the significance of the association between objective indicators and the dependent variable is influenced by the stratifying power of the survey question used to measure class identity.