The Anxious and the Climbers: Ambivalent Attitudes towards Democracy among South Africa's Middle Class

Beyond the hopes placed in Africa's emergent middle class as an engine of economic growth, some analysts see this group as a bastion of political stability and enduring democratisation across the continent. This paper's approach differs from that of most studies, which treat the middle class as a homogeneous group, through two key contributions. First, using cluster analysis, I propose a novel way of conceptualising social class that broadly draws on the Weberian idea of shared life chances. I apply this method to South Africa and identify five social classes characterised by their members' living standards, overall life satisfaction, and self-perceived upward mobility. Second, the empirical analysis reveals significant discrepancies in attitudes towards democracy between the downwardly and upwardly mobile strata of the middle class, which I term the "anxious" and the "climbers", respectively. On the one hand, the "climbers" show the highest generic support for democracy as a form of government, whereas the "anxious" middle class displays feelings of resignation. On the other hand, I find indicative evidence of a status-quo bias among the "climbers". Rather than assuming a more demanding or critical stance in politics, they allow their political priorities to be at least partly shaped by an interest in securing and expanding attained living standards; being upwardly mobile is even associated with a higher tolerance for government attempts to constrain freedom of information, opinion, or expression.