PUBLIC PERCEPTIONS OF CLASS

theories, this paper assesses the intensity of class conflict in twenty one nations across Eastern and Western Europe and the New World using ISSP data which provide large, representative, national samples. Despite some theorists ’ claims of the vanishing of the class cleavage, few respondents throughout the industrial world, even in the notoriously harmonious Scandinavian world deny the existence of class conflict. Regression analysis reveals that substantial differences among cultural-institutional groups of countries remain after controlling for individual-level differences in education, age, and sex. Americans perceive substantially the highest levels of conflict and Scandinavians perceive their societies as the least conflictual. The other Anglo-Celtic countries and the Communist and post-Communist societies are intermediate between these two. This ordering is particularly interesting because it does not follow the GNP gradient that has recently been discovered in feelings of fairness of pay and in subjective class self-placement