Moving Beyond 'Beyond 'SES'': Do Privilege and Perception of Privilege Add to the Causal Propositions of the Civic Voluntarism Model?

This paper analyses data from an original survey of a representative sample of 1,500 adults drawn from YouGov's online panel to assess the impact of privilege and perception of privilege on political participation. It builds on the causal propositions posited in Verba, Schlozman, and Brady's Civic Voluntarism Model, testing their independent variables alongside the concepts of economic, social, and cultural capital proposed by Pierre Bourdieu. Those forms of capital are taken as indicators of privilege and operationalised in the survey alongside original measures of perception of privilege. The latter concept builds on Bem's theory that self-perceptions are influenced by external cues, and is argued to be constituted by individuals' explanations for societal inequality, the relevance of those explanations to peoples' own lives, and their self-placement in social hierarchies. Structural equation modelling is deployed to test the causal processes leading from privilege through perception of privilege to political participation. As such the paper aims to offer an improved account of those processes by combining previously distinct strands of research in political behaviour and sociology. It also introduces the concept of perception of privilege, which opens the black box in which privileged status is translated into self-perceptions that can influence political behaviour.