It’s the Composition of Capital, Stupid! Changing Class Structures and Political Divides in Denmark

In studies of political attitudes and political conflicts there has been a tendency to
downplay the role class as a structuring feature of contemporary political conflicts.
New political issues are often regarded as a politics of identity or a politics of values,
rather than as a politics of economic interests. The argument put forward here is that
to fully understand the role of class in political conflicts and political divides we need to acknowledge that not only political issues, but also the structure of class and class
interests is likely to have changed in later decades. Drawing on the work of Pierre
Bourdieu we argue that class conflicts cannot be reduced to economic inequality, but is related to the distribution of a number of resources, including at the least economic
and cultural forms. To explore the historical changes in the relationship between class
and political conflict we make use of multiple correspondence analysis and draw on
data collected in relation to the Danish National Elections Studies from 1990, 2001 and 2011. We apply a simple indicator of the multi-dimensional model of class developed by Bourdieu in Distinction (1984) and construct a multidimensional model of political attitudes to explore how homologies between these two structures develop over time. We expect political conflicts to be related as much (and increasingly) to the
composition of the different forms of capital as to the volume of capital.