Subjective social status and the populist right: cognitive interviews reveal unreliable measurement

Highly influential research attributes the widespread rise of the populist right to status decline among white working class voters. It is argued that those who feel their status in society has fallen or is under threat are highly receptive to promises to buttress or restore that status through measures that weaken the position of out-groups, particularly immigrants and liberal elites. Foundational to this work is an interpretation of the International Social Survey Programme’s social ladder question, or ‘Topbot’, as measuring subjective social status (SSS) in the sense of how esteemed or respected people believe they are. Gidron and Hall (BJS, 2017) originated this interpretation, and their thesis that the SSS of the working class has declined, contributing to the rise of right populism, emerged as ‘the consensus view among political scientists’ (Oesch & Vigna, CPS, 2022: 1130) and triggered much further research, still ongoing. Topbot is far the most widely used measure of status in quantitative political science and thus forms the raw material from which scholars have crafted our quantitative knowledge of SSS and its political implications. This paper is motivated by concerns about the correspondence between Topbot and SSS, and more generally by the open question of what Topbot measures. It is by no means clear that survey respondents interpret this question in the way Gidron and Hall and others assume. For one thing, it offers extremely limited guidance to respondents, unlike the MacArthur scale with which it is frequently confused. After reviewing what is known about this item’s measurement properties, I report results from 36 interviews with a diverse sample of UK adults and discuss implications for the interpretation of Topbot. In these online ‘cognitive interviews’, respondents were presented with the question and asked to ‘read it and basically think out loud as you answer it’, with further prompts to encourage elaboration. This research has both the broad aim of exploring how respondents interpret the question and decide on their answer, and the narrower aim of asking how far the picture that emerges is consistent with how Topbot responses are interpreted in current research. While it would be convenient for Topbot to be a valid single-item measure of SSS, whether this is true requires investigation. Findings raise major concerns about the reliability and validity of Topbot as a measure of SSS. The interviews highlight above all that the question is worded ambiguously and consequently is not consistently understood. This runs contrary to basic principles of item construction. I conclude that the case for viewing Topbot as a measure of SSS is weak; rather, in aggregate it is best viewed as a composite including status, economic position, wellbeing, and substantial idiosyncratic noise. I end by discussing how progress can be made in the measurement of status to better understand the mechanisms linking social position and support for the populist right.