Class experiences and the long-term evolution of economic values

Abstract While there is a strong cross-sectional association between social class and political attitudes, recent research—based on longitudinal data—finds that changes in class are, at most, weakly related to changes in such attitudes. One common explanation for this finding is that early life socialization affects both social class and political attitudes and that class has little, if any, direct effect on them. In this manuscript, we explore an alternative explanation that centers on the importance of cumulative class experiences for the long-term evolution of attitudes. To evaluate this perspective, we leverage data from the British Household Panel Survey, which contains measures of economic values that span up to 16 years, as well as complete work-life histories of respondents that allow us to track individual class experiences over people’s life span. Our findings show that cumulative class experiences are strongly associated with the development of economic values.