Sociology Seminar: Thursdays

Time: 12:00 pm – 1:15 pm 
Date: 8th of June 2023
Place: 3105

Magne FLEMMEN (Oslo University) – ” Political Taste and Its Homologies On site and online “

Abstract : 

Recent years have seen a renewed interest in the political dimensions of class conflict. Even in Anglophone sociology, an emerging literature is drawing on the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu to cast new light on questions of class voting and class differentials of political attitudes. One point of this literature is that political proclivities may be regarded as rather similar to cultural lifestyle and taste, so that they might fruitfully be conceptualized as “political taste”. However, there are reasons to be wary of the reliance on attitudinal questions in this line of work, which for different reasons might be ill suited to construct political taste empirically. In this talk, I extend this line of reasoning. First, I try to provide a clearer and theoretically sounder conception of “political taste”, linking it to Daniel Gaxie’s concept of political market. I then construct a space of political tastes, before examining its homologies with social space, and crucially, the space of lifestyles. This shows political tastes to be systematicall connected to position in social space, in that the divisions of the social space can be retraced in peoples’ political tastes. However, while there are certainly overlaps between political and cultural tastes, this is less systematic and complete. This raises questions about whether actors orient themselves in politics with the same set of dispositions they draw on when navigating the space of lifestyles.

Hadrien Le Mer, Etienne OLLION, Patrick PRÄG (Pôle de Sociologie du CREST)
Sponsors :
CREST