Search results

In addition to their desire to address the gaps in my own essay, one possible explanation rests in a deeper and more nuanced appreciation of the role of ideology in middle-class identity formation, an issue that I ignored almost completely. The importance of understanding the ideological underpinnings of “middle-classness” is a point directly taken up by several of the commentators, but it is best articulated and most convincingly argued by Raka Ray in her nuanced historical examination of the national political projects that sustained the idea of a middle class as moral vanguard and repository of universal values and aspirations. She shows how the “ideological work that middle-class identity performs” sustains unity among disparate middle-class forces, at times achieving such cultural resonance that it will engage even non-middle classes in a common political project. That is, Ray argues that the idea of the middle class as a social category has become so culturally appealing and ideologically hegemonic in modern India that it has even enabled political unity behind the class projects of the elite.

Questions about the role and composition of the middle class have been examined and debated in the academy and in the political sphere for more than 100 years. In analyses of the Indian middle class specifically, two questions, both addressed by Diane Davis, seem to excite the most attention. The first has to do with the definition of a middle class, a term that has its origins in a very different social formation as well as its potentially mediating function in democracy. The second and more recent question has to do with what is variously called the “new” or “emerging” middle classes – in short, the middle classes of a liberalizing India.

In the past three decades India has been one of the fastest growing countries in the world. Per capita income has increased fourfold, from $229 in 1980 to $318 in 1990 to nearly $900 in 2010 (constant 2000 dollars). Although there is growing evidence of increases in income inequality, standard measures of inequality such as the Gini coefficient are still considerably less in India than in other Brazil, Russia, India, Chinas (BRICs) (or the United States). Consequently this rapid growth has led to a substantial expansion of India's middle class (and a concomitant decline in poverty).

This chapter offers a few stylized observations about the middle class and its role in the fall of communist regimes in East Central Europe. I claim that successive East European modernization projects during the 20th century (intrawar, communist, and postcommunist) were essentially middle-class “revolutions from above.” They occurred in a backward region among late modernizers keenly aware of their peripheral position and were based on and carried out by the state. Both a product of the state and dependent on it, the middle class was the main actor and supporter of these modernization efforts. I also argue that the Solidarity movement in 1980/81 and the 1989 collapse of communism were the last successful middle-class revolutions. Hopes for another political rebellion against postcommunist authoritarianism may be misplaced, since the transformational potential of the East European middle class, produced by the peculiarities of communist rule, has been exhausted. Fast progressing modernization, segmentation, and fragmentation of identity of the postcommunist middle class brought about by the economic, cultural, and political integration with the West undercut its mobilizational potential and its role as an agent of political transformations. The East European middle-class revolution against communist rule can offer four basic lessons. First, the middle class is a cultural and historical not economic phenomenon. Second, it is extremely rare for the middle class to become a collective actor, the class for itself. Third, the main competitors of middle-class identity are nationalism, ethnicity and religion. Finally, postmodernity with its fluidity, uncertainty, fractured identities, fragmented lifestyles, consumption patterns, and status configuration does not provide facilitating conditions for middle-class solidarity and mobilization, making it politically feeble.

Recent discussions of how members of the middle classes define themselves have focused on cultural patterns, following Bourdieu's (1984) influential work on how occupational, educational, and cultural fields combine to configure classes. Researchers have extended this approach to studies of the emerging middle classes in the global South, adapting these concepts to the specific circumstances of postcolonial settings in a globalizing world. This chapter explores these processes among urban middle-class Chileans. I show how members of the middle classes seek meaningful identities while engaging in symbolic combat with other groups in a society historically marked by an aristocratic elite, a recent military dictatorship, and free market policies that have reconfigured the possibilities for upward and downward mobility while integrating Chile more firmly within global commodity and image circuits. The principal foci of conflict are cultural consumption, childrearing and education, as well as electronic media use. Members of Chile's middle classes are locked in an unresolved conflict over who they are, who they should be, and where they fit in the global cultural economy.

Diane Davis has written a fine piece that seeks to reorient our scholarly gaze onto the dynamics of middle-class formation in the developing world. She writes, “…our research objective is not merely to study the appearance of an emergent or new middle class in the developing world, but to understand the implications of an increasingly heterogenous middle class” with more acute occupational and spatial cleavages (p. 14). Building political coalitions between the two main groupings of the middle class – public sector employees and small- and medium-sized industrial producers – which in the past had produced “socially inclusive development policy” faces new complications as the global economy could pit old middle-class corporatist populism and new middle-class neoliberalism against each other (pp. 16–17). Davis argues this intraclass cleavage is further intensified as the state in many developing world countries opts for decentralization and I would add as party politics becomes significantly less representative (see, e.g., Mainwaring, Maria Bejerano, & Pizzaro, 2006). New middle-class politics becomes less and less about “class” and more about civil society, both in organizational and discursive terms (pp. 24–25, 29–30). With political discourse shifting away from national politics per se toward local, more NIMBYist proclivities (p. 18), activism becomes more intense though dispersed, focusing on “issues of urban sustainability and livability” and through distinct modes of political engagement (p. 30). What Davis concludes therefore is that “middle class heterogeneity, as reinforced by the unequal distribution of new and old middle classes in urban built environmental, politico-institutional, and consumption spaces, manifests itself in new forms of inequality, democratic politics, and the decline of class activism” (p. 33). Future research would certainly benefit from a close inspection of urban issues as the crux of middle-class politics in the contemporary developing world.

This chapter proposes a definition of pro-middle class growth derived from the approach of Lasso de la Vega, Urrutia, and Diez (2010) to intermediate polarization. The authors show that a sufficient condition for growth to be pro-middle class is for the growth rate of what we define as the “intermediate median income” of the whole population to be higher than that of the weighted average of the growth rates of the rich and smaller than the weighted average growth rate of the poor, the “rich” and the “poor” being respectively those with an income higher and lower than the median income. An empirical illustration based on Israeli data for the period 1995–2018 indicates that in absolute terms growth was not pro-middle class for any income type. In contrast, growth was pro-middle class in relative terms for all market incomes (individual income from salaried work, individual wage per hour worked, household economic income, total household income and total equivalized income). But growth was not pro-middle class for net income and net equivalized income, even in relative terms. These conclusions appear to be related to the combined effect of developments in labor force participation, welfare policy changes and major modifications in income tax rates. The intermediate polarization measures indicate that in general there was no pro-middle class growth except in the case of specific market income types.

Politicians of all stripes appeal to the support of the middle class and aim their policy proposals at this group. Reference-group theory explains why citizens could believe themselves to be middle class, even if their income level or social status places them above or below. It postulates that, since the reference groups of most people are relatively homogeneous, anyone could feel ‘average’ compared to the reference group. The authors aim to test this theory by comparing perceptions about the middle class with a categorisation using objective income statistics. A survey of the adult population of the Canadian province of Quebec showed a significant proportion of citizens believing to be part of the middle class, even though their equivalised income levels placed them outside of a generally recognised income range for this group. Most notably, this subjective misplacement on the income distribution was heavily concentrated among individuals whose incomes were too high to be a part of the middle class. Our results also show that support for higher taxes on the rich might be overstated, as some respondents simply do not realise that they are a part of this group.