Research

Ramand, Peter. "Neo-Marxist and Neo-Weberian Approaches to Mapping the Class Structure: The Convergence of Erik Olin Wright and John Goldthorpe's Class Analysis."

This paper elaborates a strategy for constructing the neo-Marxist class structure matrix developed by Erik Olin Wright from National Statistics Socio-Economic Classification (NS-SEC) data in the UK. Using British Election Study data, I assess the correspondence between the reconstructed neo-Marxist matrix and three Goldthorpe-derived schemata. The results indicate that both approaches capture the same underlying dimensions of class, while retaining distinctive analytic emphases: Wright's model provides more granular distinctions between privileged locations; Goldthorpe's specifies greater diversity among intermediate positions. The analysis suggests that the neo-Marxist model can be credibly implemented from NS-SEC, and that it yields a coherent map of the contemporary British class structure. More broadly, the findings affirm that Marxist class analysis remains compatible with quantitative methodologies and continues to offer distinctive explanatory leverage on contemporary inequality.

Ramand, Peter. "Reconstructing Erik Olin Wright's 'Contradictory Class Locations' Matrix from British NS-SEC Data."

This paper constructs a reproducible crosswalk mapping thirty-five NS-SEC operational subcategories to eight neo-Marxist class locations: employers, petty bourgeoisie, expert managers, experts, managers, supervisors, skilled workers, and nonskilled workers. Each assignment is justified with reference to the theoretical convergence between Wright's exploitation-centred framework and Goldthorpe's employment relations approach established in the companion paper. Survey-weighted descriptive statistics from the British Election Study profile each class location across income, educational attainment, economic sector, gender composition, union membership, housing, political preferences, and class identity, providing a first substantive map of Britain's class structure as viewed through Wright's categories. The resulting portrait reveals a large, internally segmented working class and a differentiated professional-managerial stratum whose internal fractions—particularly between managers and professionals—are more sharply distinguished than in conventional neo-Weberian classifications. Symmetric association indices comparing the neo-Marxist matrix to NS-SEC analytic and EGP variants confirm high but imperfect correspondence, reflecting genuinely different boundary decisions around ownership, intra-salariat distinctions, and the treatment of self-employed professionals. The crosswalk is presented in full as a replication appendix, enabling any researcher with access to standard British or European survey data to implement Wright's framework without bespoke data collection.

Ramand, Peter. "Testing the Validity of Erik Olin Wright's Neo-Marxist Class Schema."

This paper provides a validation of Erik Olin Wright's neo-Marxist class structure matrix operationalized from standard occupational data. The reconstructed schema is assessed across criterion, construct, discriminant, and comparative benchmarks. Criterion diagnostics confirm that the schema reliably captures its specified dimensions of ownership, authority and scarce skills. Construct validity tests show that class locations predict income, subjective class identity, economic ideology, and trade union membership in theoretically expected directions. Class contributes at least as much incremental explanatory power as education on income, economic ideology, and union membership, while education dominates on identity formation. Comparative assessment against neo-Weberian alternatives reveals predictive performance within one percentage point across outcomes. Together, these findings establish that Wright's class location matrix can be credibly operationalized from standard occupational data and validated against mainstream empirical criteria.

Ársælsson, Kristinn Már and Peter Ramand. "How Populist Is America? Mapping Anti-elite and Nationalist Sentiment in the United States Using Latent Class Analysis."

This paper maps the structure of anti-elite and nationalist sentiment in the United States using Latent Class Analysis on the 2016 and 2020 American National Election Studies. Conceptualizing populism and nationalism as occupying two dimensions of social space—a vertical axis capturing antagonism toward political elites and a horizontal axis capturing conceptions of national belonging—we identify six latent classes, including two distinct populist clusters comprising roughly one third of the electorate. "Exclusionary Populists" combine anti-elite sentiment with ethnically restrictive views of national membership, while "Inclusionary Populists" pair comparable hostility toward elites with open and fluid conceptions of belonging. Comparing these groups within parties, we find that the primary cleavage separating Exclusionary Populists from their Republican co-partisans is not economic ideology but affective orientation toward minority groups. Among Democrats, the defining feature of Inclusionary Populists is substantially colder feelings toward big business. Contrary to claims that populism is inherently authoritarian, we find no evidence that Inclusionary Populists are more favourably disposed toward a strong leader who bends the rules than the average voter. The one affective affinity shared by both populist groups is that both feel significantly colder toward corporate America than their fellow partisans. These findings challenge approaches that treat populism, nationalism, and authoritarianism as synonymous, and suggest that inter-group affect, rather than economic ideology or material hardship, is central to understanding the populist cleavage in American politics.

Ramand, Peter. "The Strategic Dilemmas of Democratic Socialism."

"Left populism" has become the primary conceptual lens through which scholars engage the last decade of left electoral mobilizations in Europe and the Americas. An alternative approach is to consider the structural constraints encountered by left electoral projects at various phases of their evolution, the trade-offs these produce, and the ways in which movements have attempted to navigate them. This paper identifies eleven strategic dilemmas faced by left electoral projects, grouped into four subcategories: majoritarian dilemmas concerning discourse and articulation; organizational dilemmas regarding internal democracy and relations with social movements; dilemmas of electoral participation; and dilemmas of governance. Each is embedded in a different set of theoretical debates within Marxism. "Left populism," I argue, provides leverage for only one of these concerns, and scholars could usefully reengage debates on the capitalist state, associational power, and social movement autonomy.

Foley, James and Peter Ramand. "Democratic Socialism, Nationalism and Left-Populism."

This chapter assesses the strategic strengths and weaknesses of left populism as a mode of political mobilization, with particular attention to the relationship between populism, nationalism, and class formation. We argue that the left's retreat from national-popular framing during the neoliberal era—and its alignment with cosmopolitan liberalism articulated through institutions like the EU and NATO—has ceded the terrain of anti-establishment grievance to the right, weakening the left's capacity to participate in working-class re-formation. Drawing on E.P. Thompson's concept of class formation and its national-popular roots, we propose that populist discourse can serve as a mechanism through which the left relates to a fragmented working class whose traditional institutions have been dismantled by decades of deindustrialization and labour market restructuring. We test these arguments against case studies of Jeremy Corbyn's leadership of the British Labour Party and Bernie Sanders' two presidential primary campaigns. In each case, left populism's core contributions—framing politics as an antagonistic relationship between a sovereign people and an elite, and defending popular sovereignty—generated significant mobilization. However, both movements ultimately retreated from anti-establishment rhetoric into conventional party-political coalitions, with Corbyn drawn into the pro-EU People's Vote campaign and Sanders deferring to the Democratic Party apparatus. We trace these failures to structural contradictions: the postmodern identity movements that Laclau and Mouffe expected to form an anti-establishment pole have been substantially incorporated into state and corporate power, while the sociological vagueness that gives populism its rhetorical flexibility also permits convenient slipperiness when confronting actual power. Left populism, we conclude, provides leverage on the articulation of majorities but leaves unresolved the problems of the capitalist state, organizational form, and the class dynamics internal to left movements themselves.