'EMBOURGEOISMENT', SELF-RATED CLASS AND PARTY PREFERENCE.

The article sheds light on 'embourgeoisement' and self rated class. In a paper published in the periodical "The Sociological Review," sociologists John H. Goldthorpe and David Lockwood, have convincingly argued against the view that post-war affluence has made manual workers and their wives 'middle-class' in attitudes and styles of life, and have put forward a model which gives the notion of 'embourgoisement' a precise and testable meaning. This paper sets out to show that figures for self-rated class in Great Britain can, on the contrary, be used to elucidate both these questions provided that respondents have been asked about the meaning of their self-rating. The data on which this conclusion is based are taken from a national sample survey carried out in the spring of 1962. The embourgeoisement thesis is of course not new. Before the Second World War many different observers spoke of a visible assimilation between the manual and non-manual classes. Proper examination of the embourgeoisement thesis requires, however, that the relationship with income should be more fully considered. The embourgeoisement thesis would presumably lead people to expect that the frequency of Conservative support should be highest among those manual workers (or their wives) who have reached the top third of the overall income distribution, and perhaps it would also lead people to expect that the correlation with self-rating should hold within all three levels of income.