Capital, Status and Political Participation in Pre-Brexit Britain

This paper addresses one of the major conundrums of political behaviour research: why do people participate in politics to different extents and in different ways? It brings structural and perceptual components of inequality together to help understand the participatory context in pre-Brexit Britain. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the three forms of capital to construct richer indicators of structural inequality, and utilising Daryl J. Bem’s self-perception theory as well as recent work by Noam Gidron and Peter A. Hall, it argues that those structural indicators will drive how people view their own statuses. These two factors together are argued to help us understand inequalities in quantity and type of political participation undertaken by British people two years before the dramatic result of the country’s referendum on membership of the European Union. The paper analyses an original and unique survey dataset from 2014, gathered via YouGov’s online panel, which includes detailed measures of the three forms of capital, self-perceived status, and the frequency of an array of non-electoral political acts. Using confirmatory factor analysis and causal mediation analysis, the paper demonstrates the important impact of all three forms of capital on self-perceived status, and of that status on both political engagement and participation. Of particular note is the power of cultural capital, which matches and, in some cases, exceeds social capital in terms of the strength of its relationships with self-perceived status and political participation. This helps us to understand the context from which Brexit emerges by showing that there were cultural and social, as well as economic, inequalities driving the sense of one’s status. This sense, as well as capital itself, underpinned participation or nonparticipation in the daily acts of politics that sustain a functioning democracy. This paints a picture of a political domain that was disproportionately the preserve of those with particular resources, which may suggest an additional driver of anti-establishment sentiments that drove the decision of many to vote Leave.