Legitimising Inequality: How Elites Navigate the Symbolic Market for Ordinariness and What It Means for Concerns about Economic Inequality

British Elites want to come across as ordinary and regular people in part because there is a symbolic market for ordinariness which means elites are seen as more legitimate and authentic if can convince others they are just like them. One implication of these findings is that, at a basic level, the illusion of solidarity forged by expressions of ordinariness potentially obscures very real class inequalities. The existence of this symbolic market raises two important questions for research around social polarization. First, does the performance of ordinariness reduce concerns about the level of economic inequality, that is, does it reduce affective polarization because people are more likely to accept that these inequalities are grounded in notions of merit? Second, what happens to perceptions of legitimacy and affective polarization when the performance of ordinariness fails? We examine these data using experimental data from a UK sample, finding that ordinariness does reduce concerns about high levels of inequality and that perceptions of legitimacy are undermined when the performance of ordinariness does not land or indeed is shown to be only partially true.