Who ‘Dominates’ Whom? Social Class,Conjugal Households and Political Identification

Abstract

The existence of cross-class families, where the wife's occupation is taken to be superior to that of the husband, has been seen as a challenge to conventional ways of allocating class positions to partners in the conjugal household. Data from the Social Change and Economic Life Initiative survey conducted in 1986 are used to estimate the numerical importance of such families. Three approaches to the class allocation of men and women in conjugal households are outlined: individual, conventional and dominance. The predictive validity of these approaches is then assessed with the dependent variable drawn from the domain of political party identification. The outcomes of the exercise suggest that the conventional approach may require some slight finessing with respect to female respondents in cross-class families who are active full-time in the labour market, but in the main still gives acceptable results.