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Abstract

Sociological research often uses income as the only indicator to describe or proxy the group of the rich. This article develops an alternative framework in order to describe varieties of affluence as three-dimensional: depending on income, wealth, and origin of wealth. The relevance of such a multidimensional perspective for social outcomes is demonstrated by analysing the heterogeneity in political attitudes between different varieties of affluence. For this purpose, ordinary least squares regressions are applied to a sample from 2005, 2009, and 2014 German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP). The main results are, first, that the perspective of varieties of affluence reveals significant differences in social outcomes as demonstrated by political attitudes. Especially wealth possession is related to significantly more right political attitudes. Second, there is strong explorative evidence that the rich in Germany should be regarded as a heterogeneous group. These findings are robust to influential data, multiple imputations of wealth data, and endogeneity due to pooled data. The article concludes, among other things, that more data are required to make more certain assertions.