Classy behavior: the big political role of small business owners

Abstract

Many theories assign important political roles to small business owners as part of the middle and upper middle class. Despite this, we have surprisingly little empirical work on the political behavior of small business owners. Using the European Social Survey covering 28 countries over six waves from 2002 to 2012, we find that small business owners are indeed more politically active despite their diversity across sectors and countries. This counters a great deal of existing work which emphasizes the wide divergence in small business owners’ political behavior within and across countries. Rather, we find that owning a small business does have a distinct effect on political behavior in many different contexts.