The Anxious and the Climbers: Ambivalent Attitudes towards Democracy among South Africa’s Middle Class

Albeit middle-class citizens have generally been assumed to support democracy, studies investigating this class’s political attitudes using survey data have produced mixed results. This paper argues that one reason for these ambiguities is that the middle class may not be a homogenous group. Specifically, I explore how diverging perceptions of social mobility tend to condition political attitudes towards democracy within different social strata, particularly within the middle class. Drawing upon data from the South African Social Attitudes Survey, the article finds no strong evidence of any middle-class particularism in people’s opinions about democracy. Rather, the main difference in democratic attitudes and civic values is detected between those persistently locked in poverty and the rest of the population. Interestingly, the upwardly mobile ‘escapers’ and the ‘climbers’ show significantly higher levels of trust in public institutions and tend to display higher beliefs in voting as an effective tool to influence politics compared to both the persistently poor and the ‘anxious’ middle class, between whom no significant difference is found. These empirical findings demonstrate the limits to understanding people’s political attitudes in relation to their current standard of living alone.尽管学界通常假定中产阶级公民会支持民主，但利用调查数据研究该阶层政治态度的相关研究却得出了混杂不一的结论。本文认为，造成这些结论模糊不清的原因之一在于，中产阶级或许并非一个同质化的群体。具体而言，本文探讨了社会流动性认知的分化，如何在不同社会阶层——尤其是中产阶级内部——塑造民众对民主的政治态度。本文基于南非社会态度调查（South African Social Attitudes Survey）的数据展开分析，结果显示，并无强有力证据表明民众对民主的看法存在中产阶级特殊主义倾向。与之相反，民众在民主态度与公民价值观上的核心差异，存在于长期深陷贫困的群体与其余社会群体之间。有趣的是，相较于长期贫困群体与“焦虑型中产阶级”（二者之间未发现显著差异），向上流动的“脱贫群体”与“攀升群体”对公共机构的信任度显著更高，且更倾向于认为投票是影响政治的有效手段。这些实证研究结果表明，仅依据当前生活水平来解读民众的政治态度，存在一定局限性。