Making sense of middle-class politics: a secondary analysis of the 1987 British general election survey

In the past decade the Nuffield class schema has become the established way of operationalising social class measures in survey analyses. This paper carries out secondary analysis of the 1987 British General Election Survey to analyse the relationship between voting patterns and middle-class groups. It argues that the Nuffield class schema actually obstructs a proper understanding of the relationship between class and politics, and that in order to develop an adequate account of middle-class politics it is necessary to develop an alternative theoretical perspective drawing on the new sociology of the professions, and on the sociology of state formation. The paper concludes with some tentative remarks on the changing characteristics of middle-class politics.