Opinion Polarization of Immigration and EU Attitudes between Social Classes – The Limiting Role of Working Class Dissensus

Abstract

Opinion polarization between groups with different social positions in societies’ structures of inequality, i.e. structural polarization, is a likely precondition for social conflict. This is because it indicates the presence of antagonistic social spaces where political attitudes align with material circumstances and many practices of everyday life. In this study, we investigate structural polarization between occupational classes by analyzing trends in opinions towards immigration and immigrants, and towards the European Union. These attitudes are main components of a potential globalization cleavage in European countries. Conceptually, we propose that we can only speak of structural polarization if there is both high within-class consensus and between-class dissimilarity. We propose a methodology based on three statistics that together allow a detailed description of structural polarization. In our empirical analysis, we pool data from three German high-quality surveys that include detailed information about individuals’ occupational class position. We find that the trends in the response distributions of the majority of our selected items do not indicate increasing class dissimilarity. Furthermore, the working class is low in consensus regarding its positions towards immigration, which makes class mobilization difficult, whereas the upper classes’ positions holds more homogenous positions. These findings do not support the idea of an encompassing class divide in general immigration or EU related attitudes.

Deepening the divide: Does globalization increase the polarization between winners and losers of globalization?

“…How can we make sense of this finding? On the one hand, one could argue that there is simply no increased divide or polarization of globalization attitudes to explain, as, for example, some recent studies have argued for the case of Germany (Dochow-Sondershaus & Teney, 2022;Teney & Rupieper, 2023). Others argue that there is an increasing polarization on topics like immigration or European integration, but that these issues are part of a larger socio-cultural cleavage between people with universalistic and particularistic values, which is not necessarily primarily influenced by globalization but by other societal trends like post-industrialization, social class, and value-change (Langsaether & Stubager, 2019).…”

“…Part of the cleavage literature focuses on occupational class position instead of education as the key socio-structural characteristic distinguishing winners and losers of globalization (Bornschier, 2018;Dochow-Sondershaus & Teney, 2022;Oesch & Rennwald, 2010). Specifically, they follow Oesch (2006) in arguing that the inherent work logics of different occupational classes drive positive and negative attitudes toward globalization issues.…”

“…Following this literature, I use higher and lower levels of education as operationalizations of winners and losers of globalization in this study. I argue below why education should be preferred to occupational class when making such a distinction, which is used in several similar studies (Dochow-Sondershaus & Teney, 2022;Oesch & Rennwald, 2010). 2 I go beyond the existing literature by, first, specifying and empirically testing the implicit expectations of theories like cleavage theory about the effect of globalization on attitudes by arguing that globalization increases the polarization between winners and losers of globalization.…”

What polarizes citizens? An explorative analysis of 817 attitudinal items from a non-random online panel in Germany

“…Such diagnostics also hold for studies on the German case [8]. Even long-trend studies covering several decades of survey data conclude that distributive opinion polarization on cultural issues has not increased over time ( [9] for a cross-national analysis [10,11], for the German case).…”

“…Furthermore, most studies used the same item batteries to assess polarization, as most international and national social surveys comprise items with a very similar formulation. However, the formulation of an item affects the polarizing power of survey items (see, for instance, [10]). Hence, this debate would greatly benefit from reflecting on the formulation characteristics of the typical survey items analysed and the potential effects of survey measurement on distributive opinion polarization.…”