Capital, Privilege and Political Participation
Joe Greenwood-Hau (2025)
Forthcoming British Academy Monograph (Liverpool University Press). DOI (open access): 10.3828/9781836245902
Capital, Privilege, and Political Participation examines how privilege and people’s perceptions of it relate to their involvement in politics. It treats people’s stocks of economic, social and cultural capital as indicators of privilege as well as resources that help them engage with politics. It also argues that how people perceive privilege in society, their own lives and politics matters for their political participation. Using survey, interview and focus group evidence, the book shows that capital and perceptions of privilege do, indeed, relate to involvement in a host of political activities. Whilst political participation is a normal if not daily feature of many people’s lives, having more economic and cultural capital is associated with being more politically active. Perceiving the role of privilege in society is also linked to higher levels of participation, whilst perceiving privilege in politics is unsurprisingly associated with being less politically active. Questions abound about how, if at all, capital and perceptions of privilege are causally related to political participation, but the book concludes that getting involved in politics is a distinguished activity. Efforts to tackle these inequalities in participation should, according to the people who participated in the research, centre on outreach activities by political institutions, more extensive and consistent citizenship education, and the active opening up of politics to the population.
Class and politics in the UK
Joe Greenwood-Hau (2025)
Chapter in Alan Convery (ed.), UK Politics: Dynamics, Diversity, Territory (Sage).
This chapter outlines the importance of class for voting, non-electoral political participation, who gets elected to legislatures, and how well different classes (and particularly the working class) are represented. The impact of class on politics in the UK depends partly on how we understand and measure it. The observed decline in the alignment between classes and parties is partly contingent on how we measure class. The declining representation of working-class people at Westminster, and the similar lack of representation at the devolved legislatures, has further driven class–party dealignment, fuelling working-class disengagement and support for other parties. Despite declining descriptive and substantive representation of working-class voters, many politicians are keen to highlight their working-class credentials in order to appeal to those voters by offering symbolic representation.
Public support for votes at 16 in the UK: the effects of framing on rights and policy change
Joe Greenwood-Hau and Raynee Gutting (2021).
Parliamentary Affairs 74(3): 542-562. DOI (open access): 10.1093/pa/gsab018
With votes at 16 implemented for local and devolved assembly elections in Scotland and Wales, the debate on the issue continues amongst politicians in England and Northern Ireland. Testing arguments that are often made in that debate, we analyse two survey experiments and show that framing on extending rights prompts higher support, whilst framing on policy change depresses support. These effects hold when priming on consistency of legal ages and are particularly strong amongst the very right-wing. A majority of the public remains opposed to votes at 16, but our results indicate the malleability of public opinion on the issue.
Teaching facts or teaching thinking? The potential of hooks’ ‘engaged pedagogy’ for teaching politics in a ‘post-truth’ moment
Joe Greenwood-Hau (2021).
Teaching in Higher Education online. DOI (subscription): 10.1080/13562517.2021.1965567
The rise of populism has sparked a debate about the role of facts in public discourse. How should higher education teachers respond? This article reviews the literature on approaches to teaching and identifies and problematises a tension between emphases on facts and thinking. It then outlines the current ‘post-truth’ challenge, which suggests reasserting the importance of facts. The institutional, disciplinary and personal context of the article are considered before it proposes hooks’ (1994) ‘engaged pedagogy’ as a prescient response to the current post-truth moment. That approach provides an anti-authoritarianism that has the potential to break down barriers between teachers (experts) and students (trainee experts), accommodate different ways of knowing, and promote collective science. This is illustrated with an example of teaching practice from a first-year undergraduate seminar on politics in ethnically divided societies, which highlights how, despite its limitations, engaged pedagogy can facilitate the incorporation of facts within thinking.
The system works fine: the positive relationship between emphasis on individual explanations for inequality and external political efficacy
Joe Greenwood-Hau (2021).
Frontiers in Political Science online. DOI (open access): 10.3389/fpos.2021.643165
This article addresses the largely overlooked question of whether explanations for inequality are related to appraisals of the political system. It posits a positive relationship between individual explanations for inequality and three indicators of appraisals of the political system: satisfaction with democracy, political trust, and external political efficacy. Individual explanations for inequality are a form of system justifying belief and constitute part of a wider ideological view of the status quo social order as just and defensible. This positive view of the functioning of society may flow over into appraisals of the political system, imply a positive disposition towards high-status groups including politicians, and remove the motivation to blame the political system for ongoing inequality (which is instead seen in a positive, meritocratic light). The relationships between explanations for inequality and appraisals of the political system are tested for the first time in the United States, using 2002 ANES data, and in Great Britain, using data from a survey fielded in 2014. The results in the United States show few consistent or significant relationships between explanations for inequality and any of the appraisals of the political system. However, the results in Great Britain show consistent, robust, and statistically significant positive relationships between individual explanations for inequality and external political efficacy. The inconsistency in these results may stem from the differing temporal and national contexts of the surveys. It is also likely that the ranking measures of explanations for inequality in the GB data distinguished respondents for whom individual explanations are particularly important, who have a less negative appraisal of external political efficacy. However, more work is required to investigate the effects of question format, the impact of national and temporal context, and the causal direction of the relationship between explanations for inequality and appraisals of the political system.
Exploring Authoritarian Populism in Britain
Joe Greenwood and Joe Twyman (2020).
In Ivor Crewe and David Sanders (eds.), Authoritarian Populism and Liberal Democracy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). DOI (subscription): 10.1007/978-3-030-17997-7
This chapter analyses who authoritarian populists in Britain are, addressing a relative paucity of such information until now. The authors analyse data from an original survey of a representative sample of 14,923 British adults, conducted by YouGov. Using the definition of authoritarian populism provided previously by Sanders, the analysis identifies five ideological groups in the British context: Mainstream Populists, Centrists, Moderates, Left-Wing Progressives and Right-Wing Populists. The Mainstream Populists, Centrists and Left-Wing Progressives each constitute roughly one-fifth of the population, whilst the Moderates constitute almost a third and the Right-Wing Populists make up less than a sixth. Demographically, the Right-Wing Populists are more likely than the other groups to be male, and are the oldest of the ideological groups. By contrast, the Left-Wing Progressives are the youngest group, and are distinguished from all of the other groups by the prevalence of holding university-level education. Most of the ideological groups have a majority of members in higher social grades, with only the Mainstream Populists having a majority in lower social grades.
Researching Political Participation Using Survey Data
Joe Greenwood (2019).
In SAGE Research Methods Cases (London: SAGE). DOI (subscription): 10.4135/9781526478634
This case study focuses on the survey research that I conducted for my PhD, which investigated political participation in the United Kingdom. I make some general observations about understanding your approach to research and focusing on your priorities before considering the survey design, fieldwork, and analysis stages of the process. In the first of those, I emphasize the need to familiarize yourself with relevant literature before drafting your survey, to draw on established sources of survey questions, and to test and review your survey, especially using cognitive interviews. In relation to fieldwork, I outline my final surveys and the practicalities of fielding them before discussing the issue of representativeness as it relates to surveys conducted online using non-random quota sampling. Finally, in the “Analysis” section, I emphasize the time taken by data processing (not to be underestimated) and the need to look for simple solutions to the problems that you encounter, starting by choosing the simplest analytic technique that is appropriate. Perhaps I had to go through all the parts of that process to be able to make the observations in this case study, but I hope that they help you identify useful practices, avoid pitfalls, and conduct rewarding survey research.
Planned Publications
Explanations of inequality and political efficacy: which causes which?
Alona Dolinsky, Joe Greenwood-Hau, Stefanie Reher, and Christine Stedtnitz
Research note. Under review. Pre-registration DOI (open access): 10.17605/OSF.IO/PVXNU
While it is uncontested that some people are socio-economically better off than others, beliefs about the reasons for this inequality diverge: is it down to individual differences in effort and ambition, or to privilege and social structure? We hypothesise that a citizen’s answer to this question affects their views of the government. We propose that citizens who believe that society is not meritocratic are more likely to feel that politics is unresponsive. Yet, it is also possible that citizens take cues about the functioning of society from their political evaluations. We test the direction of causality between inequality explanations and external efficacy through a pre-registered question order experiment in Britain. As expected, we find a correlation between the two, but the effect of external efficacy on inequality explanations is stronger than vice versa. This suggests that rather than looking at society to assess politics, citizens look at politics to assess society.
Capital, Perceived Descriptive Representativeness and Competence, and Voting in India, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom
Joe Greenwood-Hau
Journal submission planned in August 2025. Pre-registration DOI (open access): 10.17605/OSF.IO/WFKPA. MPSA Conference paper available here.
Whether voters feel that politicians are like them is an important factor in vote choice and has implications for public views of the efficacy of the political system at large. There is often talk of a gap between voters and their representatives, in which the politicians are described as ‘not like us’ and ‘out of touch’ with the electorate. An important sub-literature has shown that social alienation on the basis of class can shape how people vote and whether they vote at all (Carnes and Lupu 2016, Vivyan et al. 2020, Heath 2015, 2018). However, the extant literature has overlooked a wider conception of the three forms of capital that are related to class and other factors: economic, social, and cultural (Bourdieu 1984). This paper addresses the possible role of these forms of capital in politics by testing their effects on voters’ perceptions of candidates. It deploys conjoint survey experiments fielded to representative samples in India, Poland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom to test whether candidates’ incomes, acquaintances, and cultural tastes affect how they are perceived by the public in diverse contexts. Specifically, it investigates perceptions of the descriptive representativeness and competence of candidates, and whether these mediate the relationship between capital and vote-worthiness. As such, the paper sheds light for the first time on whether stocks of economic, social, and cultural capital affect how candidates are perceived by the public.
The same fieldwork also underpins a future working paper (planned in August 2025), titled ‘Candidate Capital and Self-Perceived Status in India, Poland, Sweden, and the UK.’ Pre-registration DOI (open access): 10.17605/OSF.IO/NGD4E
Working Papers
Cultural Capital and Political Participation in Britain
Joe Greenwood-Hau (2022)
Existing rational choice, psychological, and sociological accounts of political participation have rarely investigated the importance of cultural capital beyond education. Yet Pierre Bourdieu’s work suggests that it should be related to political activity alongside its economic and social counterparts. Original survey data including detailed measures of all three forms of capital, and multiple types of participation allows us to thoroughly investigate this proposition in Britain. The results show a positive relationship between certain types of ‘legitimate’ cultural capital, such as attendance at the opera and exhibitions, and some forms of non-electoral participation, such as individual, contacting, and collective political activities. They also show a negative relationship between popular cultural capital, such as eating out and shopping for pleasure, and those same forms of participation. The findings offer a fuller account of the resources that relate to political participation and show that, in some cases, it can be considered a culturally distinguished activity.
Ideology and Recent Voting in Great Britain: The Salienisation of the Cultural Integration-Demarcation Dimension
Joe Greenwood-Hau, Florian Sichart, and Joe Twyman (2022)
This article demonstrates the growing relationship between cultural integration-demarcation ideology and voting behaviour in Great Britain between 2010 and 2019. Using original survey data (n = 14,923) including multiple measures of ideology, and voting data gathered at the time of each election, the article shows that voters who favour cultural demarcation are more likely to vote Conservative, whilst those who favour cultural integration are more likely to vote Labour. Further, the size of this relationship grows across the four elections, with a particular increase in its magnitude between the 2015 and 2017 general elections. This indicates the importance of the 2016 referendum on UK membership of the EU — and narratives surrounding it — in strengthening the role of ideological considerations regarding the nation, immigration, and supranational power in voting decisions. We also argue that a particularly plausible account of the observed developments centres on the idea of political elites deploying heresthetic strategies to salienise electorally favourable ideological dimensions.
Joe Greenwood-Hau 