Common people? The elite market for ordinariness and how it legitimises income inequality

Recent research has established that elites in many contexts are keen to portray themselves as ordinary and that such strategies of impression management have distinct reputational pay-offs. In this article, we draw on a range of experiments with a representative sample of the UK population to explore what happens when elite expressions of ordinariness are undermined. Our results suggest that elites are generally not punished when new – and potentially contradictory – information comes to light, unless such evidence suggests explicit duplicity. Projecting ordinariness, in other words, represents an effective strategy of impression management, even if elites lead less ordinary lives in practice. Our analysis also shows that successful expressions of elite ordinariness have implications for public acceptance of income inequality. Specifically, we find people in the UK are happier to accept higher rates of income inequality when they think those earning the highest salaries have been upwardly socially mobile.