Political ideology and poverty boundaries:Definitional mediation in perceptions of poverty in Britain

This article examines poverty boundary judgments as a core component of subjective inequality: the classificatory line citizens draw between “the poor” and “the non-poor.” Using the 2022 British Social Attitudes survey (N = 2,642), it examines whether political ideology is associated with where citizens apply the poverty label, and whether these boundary judgments account for part of the ideological association with perceived poverty levels and change. The analysis uses three BSA poverty-boundary items conventionally interpreted as relative-definition, minimum-standard, and absolute-want items. Right-leaning and welfare-sceptical orientations are associated with systematically narrower boundaries, with the steepest ideological gradient for the BSA relative-definition item. Poverty-boundary judgments are strongly associated with perceptions of current poverty and with assessments of past and future trends, and they account for part of the association between ideology and these evaluations under a theoretically assumed ordering. The findings show that disagreement about poverty is not only disagreement about facts or policy, but also about the classificatory boundaries through which citizens recognize social inequality.