The Politics of Deflecting Privilege

Deflecting privilege or class incongruity - where someone holds a class identity which is at odds with their ‘objective’ socio-economic circumstances - is a remarkably common phenomenon in the general population. Despite this, we have only a shallow understanding of how an incongruous class identity shapes political attitudes. In this project we are using a combination of survey and experimental data to show that incongruently claiming a working class identity is associated with more conservative politics amongst the general middle class, but counterintuitively is associated with liberalism amongst those in elite social positions. We also test two causal mechanisms for class incongruence; a desire to disassociate oneself from inherited privilege as well as a desire to align ones’ politics with the imagined working class as an in-group. We find more evidence for the former, and suggest that this likely contributes to why class incongruity shapes political attitudes differently between elites and those with more typical middle class occupations.