Social Class and Modes of Production of Opinion Among Ordinary Citizens in Norway

Inequality in democratic participation remains a challenge all over the west, also in Norway, usually considered a high-quality democracy. This paper draws on 44 semi-structured interviews with 23 individuals of different class positions, providing a uniquely in-depth scrutinization of how ordinary citizens orients themselves towards politics. It shows how inequalities in economic and cultural capital transposes into widely unequal dispositions toward “politics proper” – the way political questions are conceptualized and categorized internally in the political field.

The paper empirically demonstrates how social inequality is related to three key aspects of ordinary political reasoning, mediated by class inequalities in political interest. First, class structures the propensity to produce opinion across a wide variety of topics, as well as the mode by which opinion is produced, f.i. the difference between the general moral outlooks of the “class ethos”, as opposed to more “specifically political” categories of understanding. Secondly, the unequal mastery of specifically political categorizations, such as that between the political “left” and the “right”. Finally, how citizens relate to the “institutional event” of electoral choice – the act of choosing a party to vote for. Here we observe similar inequalities as outlined above, adding the observation of interesting discordances between general dispositions and vote choice, as well as the social conditionings of being a non-voter.

This paper contributes to the increased interest in qualitative perspectives on political participation and reasoning among ordinary citizens. Utilizing repeated interviews with the same individuals, with questions on media use, everyday interactions, socialization experiences, self-constructed left-right scales and a political knowledge-exercise, it offers remarkably strong internal validity in its categorization of individual dispositions towards politics. By its in-depth qualitative approach to “cultural class analysis”, it also goes in critical dialogue with theories of social class and practice, especially in the Bourdieusian vein.