Working and Middle Class Lives and the Transformation of Political Conflicts in Germany
Dramatic changes in electoral politics have led many social scientists to contend that a new cleavage is emerging in advanced capitalist democracies. Conflicts over immigration and cultural liberalization, according to this reading, signal the formation of a deep sociopolitical divide that not only separate political partisans, but also specific social classes on the winning and losing side of globalized knowledge economies. Chief among them are highly educated middle class professionals with more liberal, cosmopolitan or “universalist” views; and more traditional, conservative or “particularist” members of the working class. The book project presented in this talk develops a fresh perspective on this much-discussed divide. Based on interviews with 60 working and middle class citizens in Germany, the study explores how the politics of this new divide is rooted in class-specific moral projects by which ordinary people orient their lives. Bridging cleavage theory and Bourdieusian cultural class analysis, it is shown that cleavage formation is not solely driven by issue preferences and political ideologies, but is also rooted in classed self-understandings, moral commitments, and group demarcations. By making sense of the way in which political conflicts are rooted in the moral life of different class segments we can understand how unequal lives shape contemporary conflicts, how party appeals along the new divide resonate with some but not other groups; and what prospects there are for a further crystallization of the new cleavage.
Linus Westheuser is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University Berlin.