Rethinking the Middle-Class Protest Paradigm

2020 ◽  
pp. 100-133
Author(s):  
Bryn Rosenfeld
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Private Sector ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Detailed Data ◽  
Electoral Fraud ◽  
State Sector ◽  
Class Participation ◽  
Electoral Cycle

This chapter raises micro-foundational questions about the expectation that a rising middle-class will lead a democratic civic revolution. It focuses on political behavior and examines observed patterns of mobilized contention during Russia's 2011–2012 electoral cycle by nesting a unique series of protest surveys within detailed data on the population from which protesters were recruited. It also shows how one enters the middle-class and what alternatives one possesses to affect participation in risky collective action. The chapter sheds light on why professionals in the state-sector were significantly less likely to mobilize against electoral fraud amid heightened middle-class participation in anti-regime protests. It emphasizes that middle-class protesters from the private sector were much more likely than the working class to join the protests' democratic coalition.

Reevaluating the Middle-Class Protest Paradigm: A Case-Control Study of Democratic Protest Coalitions in Russia

2017 ◽  
Vol 111 (4) ◽  
pp. 637-652 ◽  
Author(s):  
BRYN ROSENFELD
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Population Data ◽  
Case Control ◽  
Democratic Transitions ◽  
Electoral Fraud ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
State Sector ◽  
State Dependent ◽  
Selective Incentives

A large literature expects rising middle classes to promote democracy. However, few studies provide direct evidence on this group in nondemocratic settings. This article focuses on politically important differentiation within the middle classes, arguing that middle-class growth in state-dependent sectors weakens potential coalitions in support of democratization. I test this argument using surveys conducted at mass demonstrations in Russia and detailed population data. I also present a new approach to studying protest based on case-control methods from epidemiology. The results reveal that state-sector professionals were significantly less likely to mobilize against electoral fraud, even after controlling for ideology. If this group had participated at the same rate as middle-class professionals from the private sector, I estimate that another 90,000 protesters would have taken to the streets. I trace these patterns of participation to the interaction of individual resources and selective incentives. These findings have implications for authoritarian stability and democratic transitions.

scholarly journals Solidarity infrastructure : gender and race solidarity and cross-class coalitions in the Kansas City general strike of 1918

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Jeff Stilley
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Kansas City ◽  
Spatial Organization ◽  
Theoretical Problem ◽  
Gender And Race ◽  
Race And Class ◽  
Research Questions ◽  
General Strike

This dissertation investigates alliances across gender, race, and class in the dynamics of working class solidarity. The analysis examines the geographically bounded organizational networks, community spatial organization, and political cultures in Kansas City that resulted in a general strike in 1918. The general strike is historically unexpected because it occurred in sympathy with low-wage white and Black women with the support of white union men and middle-class clubwomen. The research is motivated by the following research questions: How do we explain unexpected coalitions across class, gender, and race in Kansas City from 1910 to 1918? What collective action processes and unique historical conditions explain the militancy and solidarity exhibited during this time period? Drawing on theories from social movements and political sociology, I do a longitudinal historical analysis and process tracing to answer the research questions. The data suggest that a temporally and geographically based meso-level network, what I call a "solidarity infrastructure," helps explain unusual working class solidarity across gender, race, and class. A solidarity infrastructure is a set of formal and informal links with the support of Euro American men and middle-class women across movements, which articulate and coordinate a cross-class contentious front, mobilizing support of working class formation and solidarity. The concept speaks to why some locations in specific times exhibit inclusive collective action, a theoretical problem not adequately answered in the dynamics of solidarity literature.

Nostalgia for the 30-Year ‘Century of the Common Man’

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-27
Author(s):  
Jack Metzgar
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Economic Prosperity ◽  
Gay Liberation ◽  
Common People ◽  
Auto Ethnography ◽  
The Common ◽  
Trente Glorieuses

Jack Metzgar grew up in a steelworking family during the best 30 years in U.S. history for common people, what the French call the Glorious 30 (trente glorieuses) from 1945 to 1975. It was a time of extraordinary economic prosperity that was widely shared. Average real incomes rose faster than ever before or since, with the  bottom income quintiles advancing faster and stronger than the middle or top. This unprecedented shared prosperity did not lead to complacency and mindlessconsumerism, as was feared at the time, but rather to a golden age of collective action and a string of liberatory movements beginning with the black civil rights struggle and followed by the beginnings of the women’s and gay liberation movements, among many others. The following is an excerpt from an auto-ethnography Jack is writing about his experience of working-class and professional middle-class cultures from those times to today.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

The public's view of public health in mid-Victorian Britain

Urban History ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Sigsworth ◽  
Michael Worboys
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Health Reform ◽  
Great Majority ◽  
Personal Hygiene ◽  
The Public ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Physical Conditions ◽  
Public Health Reform

What did the public think about public health reform in mid-Victorian Britain? Historians have had a lot to say about the sanitary mentality and actions of the middle class, yet have been strangely silent about the ideas and behaviour of the working class, who were the great majority of the public and the group whose health was mainly in question. Perhaps there is nothing to say. The working class were commonly referred to as ‘the Great Unwashed’, purportedly ignorant and indifferent on matters of personal hygiene, environmental sanitation and hence health. Indeed, the writings of reformers imply that the working class simply did not have a sanitary mentality. However, the views of sanitary campaigners should not be taken at face value. Often propaganda and always one class's perception of another, in the context of the social apartheid in Britain's cities in the mid-nineteenth century, sanitary campaigners' views probably reveal more about middle-class anxieties than the actual social and physical conditions of the poor. None the less many historians still use such material to portray working-class life, but few have gone on to ask how public health reform was seen and experienced ‘from below’. Historians of public health have tended to portray the urban working class as passive victims who were rescued by enlightened middle-class reformers. This seems to be borne out at the political level where, unlike with other popular movements of the 1840s and after, there is little evidence of working-class participation in, or support for, the public health movement.

scholarly journals Deflecting Privilege: Class Identity and the Intergenerational Self

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 003803852098222
Author(s):  
Sam Friedman ◽  
Dave O’Brien ◽  
Ian McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Long Range ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Extended Family ◽  
Class Identity ◽  
Origin Stories ◽  
Class Privilege ◽  
Privileged Class

Why do people from privileged class backgrounds often misidentify their origins as working class? We address this question by drawing on 175 interviews with those working in professional and managerial occupations, 36 of whom are from middle-class backgrounds but identify as working class or long-range upwardly mobile. Our findings indicate that this misidentification is rooted in a self-understanding built on particular ‘origin stories’ which act to downplay interviewees’ own, fairly privileged, upbringings and instead forge affinities to working-class extended family histories. Yet while this ‘intergenerational self’ partially reflects the lived experience of multigenerational upward mobility, it also acts – we argue – as a means of deflecting and obscuring class privilege. By positioning themselves as ascending from humble origins, we show how these interviewees are able to tell an upward story of career success ‘against the odds’ that simultaneously casts their progression as unusually meritocratically legitimate while erasing the structural privileges that have shaped key moments in their trajectory.

scholarly journals Comparing sources of stress for state and private school teachers in England

2021 ◽  
pp. 136548022110247
Author(s):  
Jude Brady ◽  
Elaine Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Private Sector ◽  
Private School ◽  
Secondary Phase ◽  
The State ◽  
School Teachers ◽  
High Stakes ◽  
State Sector ◽  
Work Related ◽  
Decisions To Leave ◽  
Related Stress

Teaching is understood to be a highly stressful profession. In England, workload, high-stakes accountability policies and pupil behaviour are often cited as stressors that contribute to teachers’ decisions to leave posts in the state-funded sector. Many of these teachers leave state teaching to take jobs in private schools, but very little is known about the nature of teachers’ work in the private sector. This research addresses this gap in knowledge and compares the sources of stress experienced by 20 teachers in the state sector to those of 20 teachers in the private sector. The paper is based on qualitative data from a larger study. It analyses data collected in interviews and focus groups with classroom teachers and middle leaders working in mainstream primary and secondary phase education in England. The results emphasise state school teachers’ acute distress in relation to workloads driven by accountability cultures. In comparison, private school teachers report less intense experiences of work-related stress, but some identify demanding parents as a concern. The research’s novelty lies in this comparison between sectors and these sector specific insights may help to focus school leaders’ efforts to improve teaching conditions in both sectors.

scholarly journals AGE DIFFERENCES IN POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT: ROLE OF SELF-RELEVANCE

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S785-S785
Author(s):  
Tze Kiu Wong ◽  
Helene H Fung
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Older People ◽  
Age Differences ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Political Discussion ◽  
Younger Adults

Abstract Previous studies usually found that older people are less politically engaged than younger adults, especially when considering political behavior other than voting. The current study extends the Selective Engagement hypothesis (Hess, 2014) to political engagement. 81 younger adults and 79 older adults rated 8 issues on self-relevance and their willingness to engage in political discussion, arguments and collective action on each issue. The predicted moderating effect of self-relevance was not found, but older people indeed are more willing to discuss (B = 0.07, p = 0.027) and argue with others on more self-relevant issues (B = 0.06, p = 0.031). Perceived cost of collective action was found to be a moderator, such that self-relevance was less important than other factors for high-cost actions (B = -0.016, p = 0.013). The current research sheds light on potential ways to increase older adults’ engagement in social issues.

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