ABSTRACT
The examination of the influence of class on political identification and voting behaviour has reached a considerable level of sophistication in recent years (see Heath et al. 1985, 1991, Marshall et al. 1988). However, it is clear that classes are composed of different sorts of people, in a variety of occupations, and it is rare to examine intra-class political divisions systematically. This paper reports a secondary analysis of a pooled dataset of British Social Attitudes Surveys (BSAS) conducted between 1983 and 1990, which allows the nature and extent of political divisions within the “service class” to be thoroughly examined. We are able to carry this out because, when combined into one dataset, the total sample size becomes large enough to distinguish many more groups or fractions within the middle classes than is feasible using the various General Election Surveys that are currently the main tool used for the analysis of political attitudes and alignments (Heath et al. 1985, 1991, 1994). In fact the pooled dataset that we analyze has a total of 3,884 middle-class respondents, all of whom are members of the “service class” as defined by the Goldthorpe class schema, a sample size that compares well with the total sample size of General Election Surveys.
