Class effects and societal effects: Elite and working class attitudes towards political citizenship from a European comparative perspective

Comparative studies of civic culture and political attitudes usually have national societies as the unit of analysis. However, in relatively homogenous areas such as Western Europe, differences between countries are frequently less important than those observed between different social groups within each country. Here, the comparison is centred on a set of social groups the socio-economic elites and the working class sufficiently large to allow for the following observations: (1) to what extent do these groups possess, at an European level, similarities hidden by national averages and (2) whether the differences observed between European societies possess an explanatory effect on the performance of those groups, i.e. whether there is in operation a pervasive societal effect. Both hypotheses are confirmed, although in Portugal the preponderance of the latter is significantly greater, i.e. the societal effect tends to prevail over the class effect.