Rational Choice Theory || Class, Prospects and the Life-Cycle: Explaining the Association between...

Class, Prospects and the Life-Cycle: Explaining the Association between Class Position andPolitical PreferencesAuthor(s): Geoffrey EvansSource: Acta Sociologica, Vol. 36, No. 3, Rational Choice Theory (1993), pp. 263-276Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4200859 .

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Acta Sociologica (1993) 36:263-276

Class, Prospects and the Life-cycle: Explaining the Association between

Class Position and Political Preferences

Geoffrey Evans Nuffield College, Oxford, and the London School of Economics and

Political Science

This paper examines the role of promotion prospects in explaining class differences in political preferences at different points in the life-cycle. The argument contains four main propositions. First, that present resources are often discounted in favour of future rewards when making political choices. Second, that the extent of future rewards is a key distinguishing characteristic of social classes. Third, that differential perceptions of future opportunities for rewards will lead to individuals in different classes preferring parties that are at different points along a left-right continuum. Fourth, that with age there is a diminishing utility of future rewards and increasing importance is therefore attached to present resources, which reduces the discounting of present for future rewards when making political choices. These hypotheses are tested using British national survey data. The evidence, although of a limited nature, supports all four propositions. It is concluded, tentatively, that class differences in left-right partisanship among young people are primarily a result of class differences in expectations conceming future occupational rewards. Among older respondents, however, present resources are of considerably greater importance in explaining political divisions between classes. Empiri- cal support is therefore obtained for the role of prospective rewards in providing individuals in different classes with divergent interests, but this role diminishes in importance as the future foreshortens.

Geoffrey Evans, Nuffield College, Oxford OX] INF, UK

1. Introduction It is a commonplace to observe that people in different classes tend to prefer different political parties. But what is it about class that leads to such divergent preferences? The standard answer to this question involves reference to class interests. Usu- ally these interests involve the redistribution of resources from one class to another. This issue has usually formed the axis of the left-right cleavage in advanced industrial democracies and voters' positions on it have ordinarily been linked to their location in the class structure (e.g. Lipset 1960; Lipset & Rokkan 1967; Heath et al. 1991: 171-185: Evans 1993a). Nevertheless.

unless the conditions under which interests are adopted and acted upon are identified, their use as explanations of the class-politics relation is unconvincing. They are simply an unmeasured, catch-all rationalization of observed behaviour. If we are to go beyond such superficial accounts, we need to address certain empirical issues.

First, there is the obvious point that in most contexts there are numerous individual deviations from the working-class/ left-wing and middle-class/right-wing pattern. This intra-class variation indicates that class membership is not a sufficiently dis- criminating criterion for understanding interest formation. Moreover, the strength of association between, for example, the working class and parties of the left varies ?) Scandinavian Sociological Association, 1993

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across time and space. The factors that influence this strength of association may have an across-the-board influence on all voters, or may be specific to subgroups of the electorate. These factors can include: the degree of class formation as indicated by levels of mobility or identification; the mobilization of classes by organizations such as trade unions or business groups; or the degree to which the strategies and policies adopted by political parties focus on those areas in which divergent class interests can be identified. Clearly then, the identification of the conditions which influence the strength of association between class and party is a precondition for establishing how divergent class interests are produced and translated into political action.

Second, references to class interests con- tain assumptions about the role of employment characteristics associated with class position - i.e. levels of pay, job security and promotion prospects. It is these attributes of class position, rather than labels such as 'middle class' or 'working class' that presumably provide individuals with, at least potentially, different attitudes to political and economic strategies, and different party preferences. To give a more precise answer to the question of why people in different classes have different political preferences, therefore, we need to estimate what it is about class position that gives individuals these differing interests. With- out explaining why the individuals that form classes think and act as they do, we cannot explain class-based political action.'

In this paper I will focus on this second question and examine empirically the factors that account for class differences in political preferences. My focus will be on the explanatory role of the prospective elements of class positions, and, in particular, promotion prospects. I will then go on to assess the factors that account for class differences in political preferences among older and younger age groups. The focus on age reflects its role in conditioning the relative importance, for political interests. of present versus future rewards. The goal of the analysis, therefore, will be to provide the empirical basis for a rationally intel- ligible account of individuals' political

motivations in relation to their class position and their position in the life-cycle. I will then briefly consider the implications of these findings for understanding the pattern of association between class and party in relation to demographic and economic changes, thus addressing the first set of issues raised above.

2. Accounting for the relations between class and political preferences

When considering class-related influences on individuals' political preferences it is useful to distinguish between three types of factors:

(i) Job-related characteristics: i.e. employment conditions, authority, prospects, security, control. These are occupational characteristics that are associated with positions in the class structure, although whether they are considered to be constitutive of class relations depends on which class theory we are concerned with. Promotion prospects, a key feature of the John Goldthorpe's conceptualization of class, will form the main focus of this paper.

(ii) Socio-demographic characteristics: i.e. income, education, parents class/ party, trade union membership. These are distinct from class but are usually related to it in some way or other. These characteristics have sometimes been considered as part of class itself, but in the interests of analytical pre- cision it is useful to keep them distinct from (i) above.

(iii) Social psychological characteristics that can account for, or 'mediate', the relation between class position and partisanship: a popular candidate is class awareness or identity, although attitudes towards political issues, and even characteristics such as authori-- tarianism (see Lipset 1959) and perceptions of control (Evans 1993b) could be considered. These social psychological concepts can be used to render the effects of the factors identified

264



in (i) and (ii) above rationally intel- ligible.

In sum, if our goal is to establish how and why class position results in individuals voting for different parties then we need to estimate the degree to which the effect of class on political preferences is something specific to class (i), or an indirect or lagged effect (ii). A useful supplementary task is also to show how it is mediated by perceptions and attitudes (iii).

A variable commonly used to account for class differences in partisanship is income. Lipset, for example, in his discussion of 'the democratic class struggle', refers to the fact that 'in virtually every economically devel- oped country the lower income groups vote mainly for parties of the left' (1960: 220- 224). But is class voting a result of income differences? The answer, as we shall see, is no. There are, though, more theoretically appealing explanations of class voting, which relate directly to the more rigorous conceptions of class specified by John Gold- thorpe and others. These explanations involve the employment relations and conditions which constitute the distinguishing characteristics of classes, as opposed to income categories, and which provide potential bases of political interests.

In the Goldthorpe schema the divisions between social classes are based upon the 'typical' work and market situations associated with occupations, and are calculated using occupational categories derived from job descriptions and employment status (i.e. self-employment, employee, man- agement). As it measures class rather than status, the Goldthorpe schema distinguishes between the self-employed and employees.2 In addition, Erikson & Goldthorpe (1992: 41) also argue that 'employees in fact occupy a range of different labour market and work situations, among which meaningful distinctions can and should be made in class terms'. The key distinction among employees is between those 'involved in a service relationship with their employer and those whose employment relationships are essen- tially regulated by a labour contract' (1992: 42).

As I have shown elsewhere (Evans 1992b), the Goldthorpe schema maps fairly closely onto these theoretically relevant aspects of employment relations.3 However, despite the central importance of employment relations to Goldthorpe's notion of class, there is no evidence that they are important for individuals' judg- ments of their class interests. It may be the case, for example, that class position influences political preferences because of its association with other characteristics, such as education and income. We need, therefore, to unpack the cluster of characteristics associated with class and examine their independent effects on partisanship in a multivariate context. In doing so we may find that employment relations are not very important, in the sense that when measured precisely, rather than through the class schema, they may not be related to political interests. Even if they have a zero-order relation with partisanship, we may find that such effects can be accounted for in other ways.4

3. Promotion prospects and political interests

The focus of the empirical analysis will be on the role of the prospective elements of class position in accounting for class differences in partisanship. In Goldthorpe's conception of class there is considerable emphasis on future prospects as a distinguishing characteristic of a labour contract versus a service, or bureaucratic, employment relationship. This is illustrated most clearly in the following quote:

Employment relationships regulated by a labour contract entail a relatively short-term and specific exchange of money for effort. Employees supply more or less discrete amounts of labour, under the supervision of the employer or of the employer's agents, in return for wages which are calculated on a 'piece' or time basis. In contrast, employment relationships within a bureaucratic context involve a longer-term and generally more dif- fuse exchange. Employees render service to their employing organisation in return for 'compensation' which takes the form not only of reward for work done, through a salary and various prerequisites, but also comprises important prospective elements - for example,

265



salary increments on an established scale, assurances of security both in employment and, through pensions rights, after retirement and, above all, well-defined career opportunities. (Erikson & Goldthorpe 1992: 41-42) (italics added)

The political implications of prospective rewards can be understood using standard economic analysis, which focuses on the present discounted value of future income, and which implies that it may not be in the interest of people with low incomes to vote for redistribution if they expect future earn- ings to increase through, for instance, gain- ing promotions. The same argument applies if they expect other aspects of their future job situation to improve. In general, then, we propose that future rewards are given considerable weight in decisions about interests. We would therefore expect future prospects to be more important bases of political interests than are present characteristics, such as current income.

The implications of future prospects for class differences in political preferences can be understood through the concepts of 'exit' and 'voice' (Hirschman 1970). People in disadvantaged social positions (i.e. in the working class) who perceive individual exit to be likel y, will find collective voice less appealing. In contrast, if exit is blocked, then voice will appeal as the best chance of improving an individual's life-chances, or those of his or her family. If we assume that left-wing policies and parties represent a collective voice, then individuals who perceive themselves to have the option to exit from their present position into a better one, will be less likely to be left-wing.6

It follows then that career opportunities and the general viability of individual routes of advancement are likely to be have an important influence on levels of commitment to collective strategies of advancement. High levels of promotion opportunities in the working class are likely to be inimical to the formation of class- based support for parties of the left. This should also apply in other classes, thus those middle-class respondents who see little prospect of bettering their situation through personal advancement should find left-wing (i.e. redistributive) policies more appealing. Nonetheless, the poorer oppor-

tunities for individual advancement among the working class should explain, at least in part, why they are more left-wing than the middle class.

From a consideration of the prospective elements of class positions and the implications of notions of exit and voice, we can derive the following propositions:

(i) If people discount present rewards in favour of future rewards, then opportunities for advancement are likely to be a better predictor of individual versus collective strategies (i.e. voting Conservative vs. Labour) of better- ment of life-chances than is income or other contemporary attributes.

(ii) Prospects should be associated with class position: the working class should have more restricted opportunities for advancement than others.

(iii) Prospects should therefore account for class differences in individual versus collective strategies involving attitudes towards redistribution and party preferences.

4. The consequences of age As people get older the relevance of prospective versus present rewards may change. In particular, there is likely to be a diminishing marginal utility of future rewards for older respondents. In addition, of course, future benefits are likely to accrue for a more limited period than they would for younger people. It would appear reasonable to propose, therefore, that the increments of further advances are likely to be discounted to a greater degree among older respondents than among younger ones, as the additional improvements are likely to be less substantial than the gains already made. Consequently as people age, the preservation of assets accrued during the working life is likely to become more important and the political importance of future occupational advancement may decline, while the importance of their present situation may increase. In other words, with advancing age there is likely to be greater investment and more to lose, the prospect of future reward is therefore a less important consideration. This tendency is

266



likely to be further accentuated by the far lower levels of expected promotion among older employees (see Evans 1992b: table 5), which suggests that for this group promotion not only contributes less marginal utility, it is also less likely. Its subjective expected utility is therefore lower.

These arguments are summarised in the following hypotheses:

(iv) As age increases, the effect of prospects on political preferences should decrease, and the effects of current situation should increase.

(v) As age increases, the proportion of the association between class and political preferences accounted for by prospects should decrease, and the proportion accounted for by the current situation should increase.

A corollary of these hypotheses is that as age increases, the strength of the net association between class and political preferences should increase. This is produced by a decline in the strength of association between prospects and political preferences, and an increase in the association between present class position and the distribution of resources.

5. Analysis Data: The data set is the 1984 Essex 'class survey', which sampled 3,800 addresses obtained from the Electoral Register. Of these, 805 were out of scope due to their not containing anyone of the right age who was not in full time education, and 165 were empty or demolished. The achieved sample was of 1,770 respondents between the ages of 18 and 64 for men and 18 and 59 for women. This represents a response rate of 62.5 per cent of the eligible sample, which is comparable to the rates obtained by other national surveys such as the British Social Attitudes or British Election surveys. For further details see Marshall et al. (1988: 288-304). For the analysis reported here I use all of the male and female employees who work for more than 10 hours a week (n = 940-990 approx.). Of these, 150-160 worked for less than 30 hours a week. Restricting the analysis to employees who worked for 30 hours or more does not

change the findings to any substantial degree.

The measurement of social class: I use the 5-class version of the Goldthorpe schema, but without the self-employed, or employers in class I. Class allocation is based on respondents' own occupations. Fathers' and spouses' class are also measured. In addition, part-time employment (less than 30 hours per week) is indicated with a dummy variable.

The measurement of future prospects: prospects are measured by a question enquiring about respondents' chances of promotion within their present firm (Q44a). There are also two questions incorporating elements of both prospects and terms of employment. They inquire as to how immediate (Q48) or long-term (Q50) pay rises are likely to be obtained. The key division here is between those who think that the only way they will get more money is to work more hours and those who think promotion is the most likely way of improving their incomes. Service employment is likely to offer promotion as the route to improve pay, whereas working-class occupations are likely to evidence a direct con- nection between hours worked and payment, and also little prospect of advancement and the rewards associated with it. The items are combined into a Likert scale, which is uni-dimensional and has a Cronbach's Alpha of 0.70 (full details of question wording are given in the Appen- dix).7

The coding of the background variables: home ownership (ownership= 1 tenant = 0); dependency on welfare benefits (50 per cent or more of household income = 1, less than 50 per cent = 0); production sectoral location (public - 1, private = 0); sex (male = 0, female = 1); age (age in years); income (gross household income recorded to 1-11); education (years of schooling recoded to 1-7); private education (private = 1, state = 0); degree (higher educational qualifications i.e. degree, teacher training qualification = 1, otherwise 0); trade union membership (member = 1. non-member = 0).

The measurement of political preferences: The dimension of political cleavage in which we are interested concerns the well-

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established conflict between left and right- wing parties over issues such as the redistribution of resources and the role of the state. The dependent variable used to measure this conflict is voting intention dich- otomized into Conservative versus Labour Party preference. Respondents who reported intending to vote for the centre parties are not included in the analysis, because their motives for voting are less directly related to a left-right continuum.

Further details of the questions used to elicit information on respondents' characteristics are to be found on page 295-304 of Marshall et al. (1988).

6. Findings As I have shown elsewhere (Evans 1992b: table 1), class position strongly predicts promotion prospects. Among employees there is a clear gradient down the hierarchy of service/intermediate/working class. Class and prospects also predict political preferences in the expected ways. Respondents with better prospects are more right-wing, as are those in the service class and, to a lesser degree, the intermediate class.

Table 1 presents a set of logistic regression models in which political preference is regressed onto class, prospects and background variables.8 The first model has just the class dummy variables. The second model displays, in addition, the effects of income and prospects. The third model includes all of the independent variables, but without prospects. The final model includes all independent variables. Tlhe analyses presented in the table shown here include both men and women. Sep- arate analyses were also run to establish whether the processes identified in the hypotheses applied to both sexes: the coefficients for the effects of future prospects were similar for men and women across all models. Given the limited size of the sample, pooled data were therefore used, although with the inclusion of significant interactions between sex and other independent variables.9

The table shows that, even within classes, promotion prospects have a substantial effect on political preferences. The inclusion of prospects in the analysis

(models 2 and 4) accounts for a sizeable proportion of the overall effect for by class. In the full model (model 4), only foremen & technicians remain more right-wing than the working class, and then only marginally so. The effect coefficient for prospects in the full model is by far the strongest. 10 The increase in its strength over that found in model 2 is primarily a result of controlling for age, which is negatively associated with prospects and positively associated with right-wing preferences, and which thus sup- presses the effect of prospects.

In contrast to the effects of prospects, the effect of household income is trivial: its weak association with political preferences in model 3 disappears once prospects are controlled for. "I

As for the background variables: the old are more right-wing than the young - especially when prospects are taken into account. Having a father in the service class is marginally significant in a right-wing direction. Ethnic minority status, trade union membership, lack of home ownership and public sector employment have significant effects in a left-wing direction.

As would be expected from previous research on gender, social position and political preferences (i.e. Erikson & Gold- thorpe 1992; De Graaf & Heath 1992), there were significant interactions between sex and other characteristics. Specifically, women were more likely to be affected by the occupational position of their spouse than were men. Thus for women, there were stronger effects from having a service class spouse, or of not having a working spouse than there were for men: in both cases, women were more likely to be right- wing than were the reference category. In addition, trade union membership was associated with left-wing preferences for men, but not for women.

In summary, among the sample as a whole, prospects are the strongest influence on political preferences. Even in the full model the effect of promotion opportunities on political preferences is impress- ive. Also, promotion prospects alone account for a substantial proportion of the overall class effect.'2

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Table 1. Conservative vs Labour Voting Intention regressed onto class, prospects and other structural variables.

Class Only Class & Pro. Class & Soc. struct. Full Model

Coeff T Coeff T Coeff T Coeff T

CLASS

Service 0.84 (8.8) 0.57 (4.8) 0.48 (3.4) 0.28 (1.8) Routine non-manual 0.64 (6.1) 0.52 (4.5) 0.35 (2.5) 0.18 (1.2) Foremen & tech. 0.46 (3.4) 0.35 (2.3) 0.51 (3.1) 0.34 (2.0)

Prospects 0.17 (3.5) 0.29 (4.7) Income 0.06 (1.2) 0.12 (2.1) 0.08 (1.3)

Only given if significant:

PARENTAL CLASS Service 0.41 (2.8) 0.31 (2.0) Routine non-manual Petty bourgeois Foremen & tech.

SPOUSE-S CLASS Service Routine non-manual Petty bourgeois Foremen & tech. Ethnicity -1.54 (-2.9) -1.59 (-3.0) Age 0.15 (2.5) 0.24 (3.5) Sex Education Private education Degree -0.50 (-2.4) Public sector -0.28 (-2.6) -0.31 (-2.6) Welfare dependency Home ownership 0.23 (2.2) 0.28 (2.4) T.U. membership -0.60 (-4.6) -0.64 (-4.6) Part-time Sex by spouse/service class 0.71 (2.5) 0.71 (2.3) Sex by TU 0.52 (2.6) 0.53 (2.5) Sex by spouse/class missing 0.60 (2.6) 0.62 (2.6)

Intercept 4.57 4.67 4.96 5.06

Index of concentration (PRE) 0.13 0.16 0.26 0.30

Net class effects 0.13 0.055 0.04 0.01

N = 611.

6.1. The conditioning effects of age To test hypotheses iv and v, which predict that the importance of prospects is con- ditioned by age, the relations between relevant variables were examined within age bands. As I have shown elsewhere, the perceived likelihood of promotion declines rapidly with age. As people get older pro-

motion is seen as less likely. It is quite possible, therefore, that it would carry less weight in decisions regarding political choices. These issues are examined in Table 2, which contains logistic regressions of political preferences onto class, prospects and background variables for younger and older respondents separately."3

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From the regression coefficients it can be seen that the basis of class differences is conditional on age. Among younger employees, the possibility of promotion is a far more important predictor of political preferences than is class. For older people, promotion is less important than social structural characteristics such as dependency on welfare benefits and home ownership. This suggests that material possessions and resources are important for the political partisanship of the old, but not the young. Class effects also appear to be larger among older respondents. 14 The other difference between the two groups is the impact of ethnicity among younger respondents. This is presumably a cohort effect rather than anything to do with ageing. 15

From the information on the index of concentration, it can be seem that a far greater proportion of the class effect is accounted for by prospects in the younger cohort than in the older cohort. One reason for this is the weakness of the class effects in the younger age group - there is less of an effect to explain. Also, however, it results from the tendency for the pattern of association between class and other socio- demographic characteristics to be somewhat weaker among the younger respondents, whereas the links between class and prospects are consistently strong across all age groups.'6 Among the younger age group there is no link between class and trade union membership, and only a weak link with home ownership. There is also no link between ownership and vote. For older respondents, there are strong links between class, and both trade union membership and ownership, and between trade union membership and ownership and voting intention. The links between class and income are also weaker in the younger age group than among older respondents (details available on request).

7. Discussion Further prospects appear to play a significant role both in explaining political preferences and in accounting for the relations between class and such preferences. The analogy between left-wing versus right-

wing political preferences and notions of exit versus voice thus seems to be plausible. There is, however, a qualification to this metaphor: among older people, class interests are rooted more in present class position and possessions. If you are older, what you have now is of greater importance for your political interests than what you might obtain in the future. The diminishing marginal utility of future rewards shifts the balance of interests to the present, and hence to class position and its associated characteristics (i.e. housing tenure). This tendency is reinforced by the greater degree of class-structuring of resources among the older age group.

This explanation of the results of the empirical analysis links macro-structural characteristics to the experiences, motives and actions of individual actors, and therefore allows us to understand the processes through which class position translates into political preferences. It is clearly incon- sistent with the tenets of new politics theory, with its emphasis on (postmaterial) values and the role of altruistic motivations for supporting the reduction of social inequality (see, especially, Inglehart 1990: ch. 8). Nor is it supportive of the argument that voting is influenced by 'socio-tropic' rather than 'pocket-book' motives (e.g. Kinder & Kiewiet 1981; Lewis-Beck 1988). The political preferences of individuals who perceive opportunities for personal advancement apparently reflect their own expected outcomes and not those of the wider society in which they are located."

In addition to their elaboration upon a rational choice-based causal story-line, the findings also have potentially interesting macro-level implications - especially with respect to the impact of economic and demographic trends on class voting.

First, the perception of opportunities for advancement by working-class employees is associated with their having right-wing political preferences. Consequently, as the growth of service occupations tails off - at least in the advanced industrial societies - and absolute mobility rates into the service class decline, we might expect to see an increase in class-based voting.

Second, as we have seen, among older respondents there were larger absolute

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class differences in political preferences than there were among the younger group. This implies that as the populations of advanced industrial societies age, class (or class-related) bases of political interest should increase in importance - probably reflecting the existence of more clearly defined class divisions among older workers. By the same logic, future prospects should become less important than at present.

Of course, such developments would require parties and pressure groups to play a role in forming political identities and interests - the extent of class voting cannot simply be read-off from variations in dis- tributions of resources. Nevertheless, the raw material for a strengthening of the class basis of politics could be present - at least with regard to left- versus right-wing politics. It is possible therefore that rather than the rise of 'the new political agenda', which has been proposed by Inglehart and others as the primary basis of party com- petition and which purportedly cross-cuts class-based divisions (i.e. Inglehart 1990; Lipset 1981: 509-521; Dalton 1988), we could be entering an era in which the politics of class increases in importance.'8

Of course, these speculations are based upon relatively strong assumptions con- cerning causality, which may not survive examination using a more extensive evi- dential basis than the limited data I have so far considered. An obvious weakness of the present analysis, for example, is that it is not able to distinguish empirically between period, cohort and life-cycle effects. True, where these have been self-evident, such as with the effects of sex and ethnicity, it has not been difficult to attribute cause. Never- theless, a more convincing answer to questions of causality requires data with which to identify cohort, period effects and the life-cycle changes to which my theory and hypotheses refer.'9 For the time being, however, the evidence is sufficiently con- sistent with the rational choice argument I have advanced to account for class differences in political preferences to justify both present consideration and future exploration.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank John Goldthorpe and Wout Ultee for comments on a version of this paper presented at the meeting of the International Sociological Association Research Committee no. 28, in Trondheim, 20-22 May 1993.

Received May 1993 Final version accepted July 1993

Notes I We can of course refer to constructs such as

classes as though they were actors, but this is at best a shorthand convenience for the actions of individuals that make up those classes, and at worst confusing (for further considerations of this issue in the context of class analysis see Mills, nd; and Evans 1992a: 250-254.

2 The political correlates of the employer versus employee division will not be examined in this paper.

3 The key feature of the cmployment relationship involves the way in which commitment is obtained from the workforce. Servicc occupations entail high levels of trust on the part of employers, whereas working-class occupations are more likely to have closely regulated payment arrangements and to give employees less control over their jobs (see also Goldthorpe 1982). The mechanism of control by which loyalty is obtained from service class employees is via the notion of advancement and perks. In particular, unless employees carry out their tasks adequately, they are unlikely to receive the long- term benefits of career advancement that charac- terizes service class employment. In simple terms one could say that service class employees are controlled by the 'carrot' of long-term benefits, and workers by the 'stick' of close regulation and the labour contract. The distinction between these classes therefore rests very much upon the presence, or otherwise, of advantageous future prospects.

'We should note that the discovery of mediating variables of a social psychological nature is not damaging to the central role attri- buted to employment relations. The mediation of the relations between social structural position and political action by identities, perceptions and attitudes is to be expected. Indeed, the discovery of such linkages serves to make the effects of employment relations interpretable. The question of interest concerns which of these factors mediates between job characteristics and political preferences.

s 'Social identity theory' in social psychology has also used these concepts to understanding inter-group relations (i.e. Tajfel 1981).

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' Similar arguments can be discerned in the literature on socal mobility and voting, from Marx and Sorokin onwards (see, for example, Parkin 1972; Weakliem 1992).

7 All analyses were also conducted using just the perceived promotion prospects item. These findings were substantively the same as those presented here.

I Logistic regression is more suitable for di- chotomous dependent variables than is OLS regression (see Aldrich and Nelson 1984). How- ever, because the R2 surrogate in logistic regression - the index of concentration - still has problems of interpretation (Berry & Lewis-Beck 1986: 113), and OLS estimates are of reasonable efficiency when the distribution of the dependent variable is not excessively skewed (above, for example, 0.9/0.1, see Gillespie 1977), I have also checked the results using OLS estimates of variance explained. This resulted in more or less the same findings as were obtained with the logistic models and indicated that the cstimates are robust. It should be noted that the models presented here were computed using the Probit procedure in SPSSX. This procedure adds 5 to the intercept and divides the coefficients by 2.

' Models were also run to test for significant interactions between service class occupation and promotion prospects. The aim here was to see if promotion prospects were especially important for differentiating the political interests of mem- bers of bureaucratic hierarchies. This it has been suggested, is a corollary of the stress upon promotion prospects within bureaucracies in the Goldthorpe class schema. No significant or even nearly significant effects were obtained, and these results are not reported here. However, I would like to thank Wout Ultee for suggesting this possibility.

10 For these models, age, prospects, years of education, and income have all becn stan- dardized so that their effect can be compared. All other effects are for dummy variables coded 0,1.

" In the table presented here I use household income rather than pay. The use of pay rather than income, or the use of both variables, makes little difference to the strength of effect of income/pay or to the other parameters in the models.

12 A related question is whether prospects affect the formation of class identity. In analyses not reported here I show that they do. In addition, however, other characteristics, such as income, are also important predictors of identity. Tlhese findings add further evidence to the rather different social basis and character of class identification compared with political partisanship (see Evans 1992a). This is presumably because class identification is distinct from class interests (see,

for example, Hodge & Treiman 1968). Identity can refer to many non-political characteristics, such as similarities in recreational activities and consumption tastes. There is no reason to assume that the factor which influence the perception of similarity in such respects are the same as those which influence the perceived similarity of political and economic interests.

13 The somewhat crude comparison of younger and older respondents reflects the limitations imposed on multivariate modelling by the small sample size: with smaller age bands some analyses were unable to reach convergence. As can be seen, there were also fewer significant interactions between sex and other characteristics, presumably reflecting the weaker statistical power of these analyses.

'4 It is possible that high levels of expected promotion could weaken the links between present class position and political preferences. When promotion prospects are generally perceived to be good, class could be expected to form a weak basis of political interests, whereas when prospects are perceived to be poor, the class-party link should be stronger. Given that chances of advancement are negatively related to age, among younger age groups present class is likely to be a less important base of interests than promotion prospects, whereas for older age groups present class position should play a more significant role in providing interests than prospects. However, no evidence was found for this as a comparison of class differences within high, medium and low bands of the prospects variable showed no significant variation; all were of the order of Pseudo R2 = 0.06.

15 There were so few ethnic minority respondents in the older group that the variable had to be removed so that the maximum likelihood estimation would converge.

16 At the suggestion of a referee, further analyses were carried out dividing the younger age group into 16-24 (who are more likely to be in temporary positions) and 25-34 cohorts. The effects of prospects were similarly high in both groups.

'' This is not to say that left-wing voting by the working class cannot itself be understood in rational choice terms. Korpi (1971) provides an informative example of just such an analysis with respect to cross-national variations in the strength of support for communist parties.

" There is in any case some doubt about the magnitude of even the contemporary political impact of attitudes towards 'new agenda' issues (see Buerklin 1987; Heath et al. 1990; Evans 1992c; Studlar & McAllister 1992; Evans 1993c).

19 It is also possible, of course, that both political preferences and expectations are caused by some other characteristic of individuals: the

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degree to which the link between promotion prospects and political preference is one of cause and effect remains to be assessed.

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Appendix: Iterm used to measure promotion prospects

Q44a (Intemal promotion) 'use this card to say how high you think your chances are of being given a significant promotion within your present organization.' [response categories: definite, high chance, fifty-fifty, low chance, no chance]

Q48 (Immediate way to pay rise) 'Thinking about the immediate future, in which ways on

this card are you most likely to increase your present level of pay?' [longer hours, more productivity, promotion, union pay rise, own pay rise, second job, higher job in new organization, same job in new organization, other, no way of getting rise]

Q50 (Long-tern way to pay rise) Minking ahead a few years, which of the ways on this card do you think is most likely to lead to you getting an increased level of pay?' [longer hours, more productivity, promotion, union pay rise, own pay rise, second job, higher job in new organization, same job in new organization, other, no way of getting rise].

Many of the response categories for both Q48 and 050 had only a few cases in them. Responses to both questions were therefore recoded to promotion, versus longer hours, with a miscel- laneous middle category.

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