The middle class as a culture structure: rethinking middle-class formation and democracy through the civil sphere

Abstract

This paper proposes a new cultural link between the middle class and democracy. In comparative democratization, scholars remain strongly wedded to economic-materialist understandings of the middle class. They define the middle class by income or occupation, but disagree on its role in democratization and weakly explain middle-class formation. In contrast, this paper reconstructs the cultural structures that intertextually link the language of class to the language of democracy. Middle-class discourse is undergirded by a stable set of binary codes through which social actors establish creative links to the discourses of the civil sphere. Embedded in the civil sphere, middle-class discourse takes on three institutional functions—specifying the terms of solidarity and exclusion, intersphere translation, and civil-regulatory power relatively independent of the civil sphere’s own institutions.