People with different political beliefs do not only disagree about how much poverty exists in Britain but they also differ over whether the same material circumstances should be defined as poverty, according to new research from the University of Bath School of Management.
Published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, the study found that people with more right-leaning or welfare-sceptical political views were consistently less likely to classify certain material circumstances as poverty, while those with more left-leaning or welfare-sympathetic views were more likely to do so.
“This helps explain why public debates about poverty remain so divisive. Statistics can tell us how many people fall below a specified threshold. They cannot decide for us where that threshold should be drawn,” said Dr Joanna Syrda, author of the research paper Political ideology and poverty boundaries: Definitional mediation in perceptions of poverty in Britain
“These ‘poverty boundary judgments’ play an important role in shaping perceptions of social inequality. People start with different assumptions about where the poverty line should be drawn and there is often confusion about whether we are talking about relative poverty, minimum standards of living, or absolute deprivation,” Dr Syrda said.
Using responses from 2,642 participants in the 2022 British Social Attitudes Survey, the study examined whether people consider different living situations to represent poverty.
Respondents were asked whether someone should be considered in poverty under three different conditions: having enough for essential needs but not for things most people take for granted; having enough to eat and live but not enough for other necessities; and not having enough to eat and live without going into debt.
Around 41% classified the first, socially comparative circumstance as poverty. The proportion rose to 68% for the minimum-standard circumstance and 80% for the most severe subsistence-and-debt circumstance. The findings showed that ideological differences were strongest for the broadest and most contested definition of poverty and weakest when describing severe hardship.
“There is, essentially, greater public disagreement over relative poverty than over extreme deprivation. While most people can agree that someone unable to afford basic subsistence is poor, there is less consensus about whether people excluded from ordinary living standards should also be considered poor,” Dr Syrda said.
The research found that people's opinions about poverty were linked to their broader political beliefs, such as whether they leaned left or right politically and how much they supported welfare, independently of the specific political party they voted for. Their attitudes to poverty reflected deeper political values than just party politics, Dr Syrda said.
The research also found that the poverty boundaries people adopt are closely linked to how they view the scale of poverty in Britain today, whether they believe it is rising or falling.
Left-leaning and welfare-sympathetic people applied broader definitions of poverty and were significantly more likely to say there is a lot of poverty in Britain. They also said it has increased and will continue to increase. Right-leaning and welfare-sceptical individuals adopted narrower definitions and consequently perceived less poverty.
“Public arguments about poverty often appear to be disagreements about facts, trends or government policy. But my findings suggest that many of these disagreements begin earlier, with differences in how people define poverty itself. When people draw different boundaries around who counts as poor, they can look at the same society and come away with very different conclusions about the scale of the problem,” Dr Syrda said.
She said it would be helpful for researchers, policymakers and journalists to understand in discussions about poverty which definitions are being used, whether they are based on relative living standards, minimum standards of living or absolute deprivation – remembering that these are not universally shared thresholds.
“Making those assumptions explicit may not eliminate disagreement, but it can help clarify exactly what is being debated. And I would hope that similar processes about definition might help debates around other hot public topics such as homelessness, in-work poverty and misinformation,” Dr Syrda added.