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Introduction: Sexual prejudice negatively affects the quality of life and life chances of those involved. Manual workers are consistently found to be less accepting of homosexuality in studies of sexual conformism. This can be seen as an application of Lipset's 'working class conformism'. Our core hypothesis is that this lower tolerance is rooted in working-class experiences. Counter-arguments are that that social class does not matter in contemporary society and that the relationship is spurious, with education as the true cause. Methods: We test the central hypothesis with European survey data. First, we regress sexual prejudice on time trends and class with repeated cross-sections from the European Social Survey, ranging from 2002 to 2016. As an extra check, this is also applied to the European Values Study, going back to 1981. Further, we test the spuriousness argument with a matching design, testing whether stratification accounts for the lag. Results: The time series shows a stable lag between working-class members and others against the general trend of decreasing sexual prejudice. The matching design provides evidence that working-class membership in itself is a factor behind differences in sexual prejudice. Conclusions: Contrary to 'death of class' conjectures, working-class membership is related to sexual prejudice. This contribution shows that this gap is due to experiences of belonging to the working class and not solely to educational differences. Policy Implications: Occupational experiences, especially in low-skill manual labour, have social effects in areas such as sexual prejudice. Improving the quality of work thus facilitates a more inclusive society for sexual minorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributing to the debate on the decline of the middle class, this article provides a comparative and longitudinal analysis of changes to the relative position of middle income groups in 19 (post)industrial countries between 1985 and 2005. How much did the income position of the middle worsen compared with more vulnerable groups? To what extent did public policies mitigate the market position of different income groups? The analysis is based on microdata of the Luxembourg Income Study. It divides the broad category of ‘middle class’ into three groups. Results suggest little change in the income position of the middle classes with respect to both market and disposable incomes. In most countries market incomes in the top quintile increased remarkably while the bottom quintile group lost out. The scale of government income redistribution has improved the position of the lowest income group, while burdening the highest income group. But it failed to fully compensate for the growing gap between the top and bottom income groups. The distance between the middle and the top incomes grew significantly, which might be one reason for the current public debate about an endangered middle class. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The following is an analysis of the state of the working class in contemporary Russia, and of the ways in which sociological researchers have come to view this section of the society. The decline in researchers' interest in problems of the working class is a well-known thesis. Nonetheless, in the period from 1990 through 2005 around seventy publications appeared in Russia, representing different schools of science, views, and approaches to the topic of today's blue-collar workers. Is this a lot or a little? For comparison, from 1960 through 1980, just monographs devoted to the working class numbered more than fifty. As concerns the journal Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, during the given period, thirty articles were published in it. The journal's purpose in publishing a selection of materials is to activate and bring up to date the study of the working class under the new conditions and to draw attention to this vital, multifaceted theme. We invite the participation of authors who have worked for many years in this area as well as young researchers who are just starting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]