An Interpretation of the Relation Between Objective and Subjective Social Status

The pluralist and interest-group (or modified Marxian) views of society offer two competing sets of hypotheses concerning the relationship between objective and subjective social status and the role of other variables in this relationship. Using a 1964 national sample survey of the United States, this paper specifies and examines these hypotheses more fully. Starting with a series of simple formulations, and building up to a fuller multivariate recursive system, the paper concludes that the data are more consistent with the interest-group approach than they are with the pluralist approach.