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People's subjective images of class and class conflict reflect a mixture of both materialist forces and the vivid subjective images of equality and consensus among family, friends, and coworkers. These reference group processes distort perceptions of class: They make most people think they are middle class, thereby weakening the link between objective class and subjective perceptions of class and class conflict, fostering consensual rather than conflictual views of class relations, and attenuating the links between class and politics, particularly in Central European nations. Maximum-likelihood analyses of large, representative national samples from six Western democracies support the argument.
A century of political sociology has built on Marx's materialist thesis that politics reflects people's objective class positions. For most Western democracies, the prevailing view remains that "politics is the democratic class struggle" (Anderson and Davidson 1943). In this view, objective class position determines people's subjective perceptions of their own class positions, and these perceptions in turn shape perceptions of conflict between classes. All three--objective class, subjective class, and perceptions of class conflict--in turn determine political outcomes as people rationally pursue their self interests. But even in Western societies in the past century, the effects of objective class position are sometimes weak (Centers 1949; Jackman and Jackman 1983; Simpson, Stark, and Jackson 1988; Knoke 1976:80-89) and vary by nation and historical period (Franklin, Mackie, and Valen 1992a; Lipset 1964, 1981; Lipset and Rokkan 1967a; Kelley, McA11ister, and Mughan, 1985; but see Hout, Brooks, and Manza 1993). Nor have left-wing parties ruled supreme, despite the numerical dominance of the working class. To account for these differences, various idiosyncratic factors have been proposed, including history, culture, religion, nationalism, and the impact of particular politicians or unique political circumstances. Few of these factors apply beyond a single case, and none offers a persuasive general thesis (Franklin, Mackie, and Valen 1992b:4).
We suggest a common cause: referencelt group processes (Merton 1968, chaps. 9-10; Stouffer, Suchman, de Vinney, Star, and Williams 1949) which systematically distort perceptions of class. These processes make most people think they are middle class, thereby weakening the link between objective class positions and subjective perceptions of class, fostering consensual views of class relations, and attenuating links between objective class positions and perceptions of class conflict. Moreover, we argue that...