Tradition, status, experiences: The cultural modernization of habitual dispositions and class fractions in the socio-political space in Germany 2002–2018

About 30 years ago, an intense reception of Bourdieu’s theory by two supposedly opposing milieu theories emerged in German sociology. While Gerhard Schulze critically opposed Bourdieu’s class concept with his theory of the experience of society, Michael Vester further developed the concepts of social space, habitus, and (occupational) fields in the Bourdieusian tradition. This article reconstructs these two main theories of milieu research and shows that both can be synthesized by elaborating on recent impulses from empirical research. Using data from the European Social Survey (ESS, 2002–2018) for Germany, the article constructs three basic habitual dispositions based on principal component analysis: tradition seeking, status seeking, and experience seeking. Regression analyses are first used to show that these dispositions are associated with political indicators and have different effects in different (vertical) economic classes. In a further step, the dispositions are grouped into habitus types and (horizontal) class fractions. By employing multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) of class fractions, occupational classes (according to Oesch), and political indicators, the structure of a socio-political space is revealed that synthesizes the approaches of Bourdieu, Vester, and Schulze and links milieu research with international research on cultural class analysis and changing political spaces.