Political distinction: Searching for a structural similarity between class and politics in Flanders (Belgium)

The aim of this paper is to investigate the logic behind lay people’s ideological position taking and how this is determined by class position. I therefore examine to what extent there exists a similarity between the configuration of the political field and the structure of the space of social classes. The paper includes a brief description of the two most salient political alignments today, namely the old economic alignment and the new cultural alignment, and an explanation of how this two-dimensional political structure pertains to the rise of the new middle class. Directly related to this, I also present a discussion on the importance of the ethical habitus to understand the mechanism behind class determined political position taking. Subsequently, based on survey data and using multiple correspondence analysis, I empirically reproduce this political structure for Flanders (Belgium). Finally, relying on the visualized regression technique, I demonstrate that there exists a clear structural similarity between the political field and the space of social classes, which is a strong indication that the class-engendered ethical habitus is, in fact, the underlying factor that gives structure to the variations in political attitudes.