How do people attribute Social Status and does it Influence Political Orientations?

Research has identified low social status as a basis of radical right support, voting for Brexit, and voting for Trump. However, these studies use ambiguous and invalid measures of social status, or indicators of quite different constructs assumed to be proxies for status. This paper presents a new, direct, and comprehensive evaluation of the status structure of Britain, in which we investigate the factors that shape social status judgments using a conjoint survey experiment with 7,680 respondents making 30,720 status assessments. We test economic (occupation, income, wealth, education, class background), cultural (leisure activities and supermarket choice), and ascribed (gender and ethnicity) factors as determinants of social status. We also contribute to understanding of which factors distribute the most status by combining our experimental estimates with data on the prevalence of status predictors in the British population. We find that economic factors, particularly income and wealth, have by far the largest impact on status distribution. Cultural factors have a smaller effect, with ascribed characteristics like ethnicity and gender distributing the least status across the whole population, despite sizeable individual-level effects for ethnic minorities. We then examine the relationship between the imputed status scores of our respondents and voting, political values, and immigration attitudes.