What Constitutes a Subjective Class? A Comparative Study on 59 Countries

Subject class refers to how individuals perceive their class position, which is shaped by their sense of belonging to a particular class and how they view their position within a broader social structure. Many studies have been done on this topic, and they consistently identify a gap between the objective class and the subjective class. Such discrepancy is observed among different classes across countries. One potential reason is that the feeling of subjective class is associated with more than objective measures such as income, education, or occupation. But so far, few have explored this question systematically, let alone comparatively. This study aims to find what values constitute a subjective class and compare the commonalities and differences across countries. We use a belief network approach to examine the correlation between subjective class and its associated value, utilizing the most recent WVS on 64 countries to create a value network around the subjective class in each country. We find that subjective class is shaped by a mixture of value systems, and countries with different political values enjoy different conceptual connection logic.