Pre-political bases of a new cleavage? : social identities, moral economy, and classed politics in Germany

The thesis takes up debates about emerging ‘cultural class conflicts’ between workers and a left-liberal new middle class. Such conflicts are said to be fought over issues like migration and diversity, law-and-order, or cultural liberalization; and to be rooted in diverging lifestyles and moral intuitions of communitarian, ‘down-to-earth’ workers and cosmopolitan middle class ‘frequent travelers’ (Calhoun 2002). Influential diagnoses describe the conflict of these worldviews as one that pits large sociopolitical groups against one another, not only in the form of ideologically polarized camps, but also on the deeper, more visceral level of social identities. The study interrogates this diagnosis empirically, centering on Germany and using a mixed-method interview- and survey-based design. It reconstructs the contours and sociostructural roots of key ideological divides in the German population, and explores to what extent the social identities of crucial class fractions can be said to polarize along a new set of divides. Guiding the analysis is the analytically most advanced scientific formulation of some of the core assumptions behind the ‘new cultural class conflict’ discourse: scholarship on the rise of a new cleavage of universalism and particularism (Häusermann and Kriesi 2015). This research tradition centers on a divide over transnationalization, authoritarianism, and welfare deservingness, articulated by New Left and Radical Right parties, whose class bases are said to be found among middle class sociocultural professionals on the one hand, and production workers on the other. The study contextualizes the diagnosis of a new cleavage as one attempt of coming to grips with the reordering of class and politics in postindustrial societies. That problematic is shared by a second tradition drawn on here, Bourdieusian research on new forms of “classed politics” (Jarness, Flemmen, and Rosenlund 2019). Both approaches see a continued salience of social structure in postindustrial ideological alignments, which they identify with similar, multi-dimensional understandings of class. Further, both approaches focalize the mediating position of social identities between social structure and political alignments (Bornschier et al. 2021). In a two-step empirical study, neo-Bourdieusian and cleavage approaches are brought into conversation on two levels. The first is the spatial reconstruction of correspondences between social structure and ideological polarities. This forms the object of the first part of the analysis, which develops a geometrical reconstruction of the German sociopolitical space, analyzing data from the 2018 General Population Survey ALLBUS, using the technique of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA). The goal is a holistic reconstruction of the contemporary linkages between social structure and ideological divides, or what I call the class-political constellation. This reconstruction also serves to interrogate the idea of a rift sorting classes and class fractions into opposing ideological camps. Results confirm that the German political space is “classed”, with considerable correspondences between ideological positionings and social positions. A cartwheel-shaped constellation of four divides – between redistribution and property, universalism and particularism, left and right, and anti-populist ‘high’ and populist ‘low’ politics – structures the German political space. This constellation corresponds to vertical and horizontal social divides based on the volume and composition of capitals. Issues of universalism-particularism form a central divide that separates workers and sociocultural professionals, among other groups, confirming findings of the new cleavage literature. Putting this framework in dialogue with Bourdieusian political sociology, the MCA also reveals that the class-political constellation does not take the form of Manichaean political camps, but that of a gradational space. Instead of coherent and polarized camps, cleavage poles describe loose clusters connected by family resemblances. Coherent universalists and particularists are minorities, the majority stands in between. Overall, the polarization of the space is limited and there is an ideological center encompassing positions on which very large majorities concur. Sociopolitical divides that are salient are multidimensional and do not align on a single line of conflict. Further, the political space is not only structured by differences in political opinions but also by degrees of exclusion from politics altogether, with lower strata, particularly workers, on the excluded side. This first step of the analysis paints a nuanced picture that refutes central assumptions of ‘cultural class conflict’ discourses, while upholding the centrality of class and inequality for political and ideological alignments. It also sets the stage for the second, more extensive part of the study, which centers on classed forms of social identity. In cleavage theory, speaking of a full-blown cleavage requires not only the coincidence of social bases and voting tendencies, but also the formation of distinct group identities and modes of normative integration. This sociocultural or identity level of cleavages has largely been neglected in past cleavage scholarship or treated in a reductionist way. The second part of the study aims at this gap, and digs into the pre-political realm of identification and social morality, below and beyond the sphere of party competition. It asks whether and how the divide of universalism-particularism rests on deeper pre-political bases of classed identification, zooming in on the class fractions most distant on the universalism-particularism divide in the quantative analysis: production workers and middle class sociocultural professionals. Theoretically, this part draws on Bourdieusian cultural class analysis (Savage 2012). It unpacks the elusive concept of identity into three more specific relational components (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). These are a) self-understandings embedded in a sense of social location, expressed relationally through symbolic boundaries; b) moral boundaries and moral economies; and c) relations to politics, i.e. what “politics” is to people and how it relates to who they are. Against intellectualist understandings of public opinion, this approach highlights the non-ideological and pre-reflexive articulation of positionings through embodied, intuitive schemes of categorization which Bourdieu calls habitus. The basic idea is that the regularities of political positionings among ordinary, i.e. non-expert citizens generally do not spring from coherent ideological orientations regarding political conflict, but from basic practical schemes and modes of thought embedded in wider forms of life. Empirically, this part draws on 50 in-depth interviews with Millenial cohort production workers and sociocultural professionals in Germany. Interviews centered on self-understandings, asking respondents to describe “the type of person you are”. The line of questioning was deliberately kept open, leaving the respondents a lot of space to focalize elements of their self-understanding they wanted to highlight. Cleavage-related issues, and political positionings overall, were deliberately not prompted, leaving open whether they were salient or not. Similarly, the analysis of the interviews, based on techniques of the Documentary Method, reconstructed classed forms of social self-location, morality, and relations to politics in a holistic way, and only then asked for the role that cleavage-related identification played in them. The results of this second step of the analysis are in-depth portraits of six diverse clusters of sociomoral identities and relations to politics found in the two class fractions. Workers clusters include rural, status quo- and respectability-oriented Working Class Conservatives; Social Populists negotiating a perceived loss of status as manual workers by sharp boundary drawing against both those above and those below; individualized Pragmatic Privatists living by a creed of ‘live and let live’; as well as Alternative Workers whose activism leads them to a disidentication from the working class. Among the sociocultural professionals sample, a cluster of caring, recognition-focused Social Therapists is distinguished from an expertise-centered and socially distinctive cluster of High Liberals. Each of these clusters stands for common entanglements of social location, identity, and morality, entanglements that are also reflected in specific relations to politics and political positionings. What emerges is a panorama of diverse social identities within the two classes, directly mirroring findings of the quantative analysis. The core of each of the social identity clusters is situated in a specific moral project. These are captured e.g. as the pursuit of embeddedness among Working Class Conservatives, of deservingness among Social Populists, of autonomy among Pragmatic Privatists, of solidarity among Alternative Workers; flourishing among Social Therapists, and expertise among High Liberals. Each moral project is anchored in a specific sense of social location which respondents seek to revaluate. Doing so, they each draw on a specific set of identity categories, demarcations from specific others, distinct forms of occupational and gendered ethos, as well as invocations of implicit social contracts inscribed in the wider moral economy. These pre-political constellations furnish the central categories also for political positionings, and thus mediate between social structure and political ideology. In this way, the study paints a rich picture of social identity processes among two classes central for recent debates of realignment. It is shown that the coherent, ideological, conflictual, and dualistic picture of cleavage conflict does not describe the vernacular in which most people develop their views in everyday life. Instead, the politics of ordinary people is an appendix of pre-political moral projects situated in social structure. To understand the pre-political realm, we need a different vocabulary than that suggested by diagnoses of ideological conflict and ‘culture wars’. Yet, there are specific instances and dynamics by which pre-political identity constellations do provide openings for the formation of a new cleavage. These give important insights into potentials for future realignment. In this sense, the findings of this part of the study are two-fold. On the one hand, it identifies some crucial sites and dynamics by which classed social identities provide a “mobilization potential” for a deeper politicization of the universalism-particularism divide. But at the same time, it shows that as a diagnosis of an existing state of social division, the geological imaginary of a new cleavage rift running through all of the social sphere is misleading. While discourses about a ‘new cultural class conflict’ are thus rejected, the diagnosis of a new cleavage is confirmed as a description of the structural underpinnings of an important pattern of partisan alignment and, to some degree, partisan identification. The diagnosis is shown to be much less accurate in the realm of pre-political identities, where a new cleavage only exists as a set of more or less diffuse potentials. Is German society ripped into antagonistic halves or thirds by the cultural conflict of a high education, frequent-flying universalist new middle class looking down on a rooted and traditional particularist working class which resents them? The answer this study gives is: no, not really. But political actors who want to make such a conflict reality could draw on a range of distinct potentials and openings.