Recent political developments in established democracies have renewed attention to the politics of identity. Some commentators have expressed concern that polities are fracturing along increasingly narrow social identity lines, in the process, losing their ability to build solidarity around shared commitments such as redistribution. This article takes stock of the strength of Canadian social identities and their consequences for redistributive preferences. It asks: first, which group memberships form the basis of Canadians’ perceptions of shared identity, and second, do these group memberships shape preferences for redistribution? This study answers these questions using two conjoint experiments that assess respondents’ perceptions of commonality and support for redistributing to hypothetical Canadians who vary on multiple dimensions of identity and need. Findings support that Canadians perceive greater shared identity with some of their groups (their social class) over others (their region or ascriptive identity), but that they overwhelmingly prioritize redistributing toward those who need it over those with whom they share group memberships.

This article analyses the abolition of slavery and the transition to free labour in late nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, seeking to understand the terms and timing of Puerto Rican abolition and the nature of society in its wake. Especially important in Puerto Rico, it argues, was the intertwined nature of slavery and other forms of forced labour as well as the predominance of foreign merchants and planters in the island's economy, which created multi-class alliances between working-class Puerto Ricans and creole elites. These class dynamics interacted with events in the metropole to influence the terms of labour on the island.

Much attention has been paid to the changing class cleavage that structured political conflict in the twentieth century. In contrast to most advanced democracies, class voting has traditionally been weak in Canada. Using the entire series of the Canadian Election Study (1965–2019), we find the historic pattern of working-class voting for the New Democratic Party (NDP) held outside of Quebec in recent elections, before suddenly falling off in 2019. Starting in 2004, we find a clear and distinct trend where the working class has increased its support for the Conservatives. Although greater partisan sorting is occurring over the economy, cultural issues such as moral traditionalism and anti-immigration are now significant drivers of working-class Conservative support. The findings carry important implications for class-party relationships and reveal that Canada, despite its comparatively weak nativist cleavage, is not immune from the tensions social democratic parties have recently experienced in maintaining cross-class coalitions amid socio-economic structural changes.

How did “capitalists”, “petty bourgeoisie”, and other class categories based on Marxist critiques of capitalism become highly visible in local society while communist regimes abolished capitalist institutions? Conventional approaches to class lack the necessary tools for unraveling such “Marxist classes”, let alone their impact on class formation in the common sociological sense. I use Weber, Foucault, and others (together with a study of the emergence of a “petty bourgeoisie” in a Chinese school system) to highlight the bureaucratic struggle of the state to classify everyone with a Marxist schema of classes. Spotlighted are “textual corroboration” and “workplace ascription” of class status, two everyday processes carried out by state representatives that normalized the class categories as well as muddied their boundaries. I contend that official conversion of jobholders into different kinds of predefined class subjects rendered any “class-in-itself” or “class-for-itself” virtually impossible. The conclusion suggests how further research on bureaucratic classification and Marxist classes can advance understanding of state-society relations under communism, especially in comparative terms.

This article considers aspects of the use of class in sociology and anthropology since the period around 1970, when Neo-Marxism became important in the social sciences, and is concerned primarily with Marxist and Weberian uses of the concept. It considers changes in the use of class in terms of two dimensions. One is the degree to which class is placed in a more macroscopic or more microscopic frame. The other is the degree to which class is defined in more objectivist terms or relies more on the way that the people being studied use the term. It is argued that since around 1970 writing on class has tended to become more microscopic and subjectivist. This tendency is related to changes within the two disciplines and within society more generally. The article closes with a consideration of some of the costs of this changing scholarly orientation to class.

This ethnographic article discusses how race emerges between discourses of class and space at the University of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Following a legal decision, this academic institution was required to implement racial quotas to combat social exclusion and raise the number of ‘black’ students in public higher education. A crucial question is whether such racially based policies help redress social inequalities, or whether they actually increase discrimination by reifying ‘racial’ differences in Brazil. I argue that the social diversity promoted by quotas at the university stresses certain urban tensions and unequal dynamics that come to be reflected within the university. However, it also reveals novel and positive paths by which policies can negotiate these contrasts.