6 POLITICAL ATTITUDES AMONG THE WORKING POPULATION QUICK FACTS „ German society is not divided, but rather character­ised by consensus. Nevertheless, there are policy areas in which society appears to be less united. For example, there is a fairly even distribution of different answers to the question of how to reconcile prosperity and climate protection. But there are not two blocs with opposite views confronting one another, as in a divided or polar­ised society. There are also areas that are even more strongly characterised by consensus, such as the strong approval of same-sex marriage. „ If the working population are divided up into three attitude groups – nationally oriented, open to the world, or neither one nor the other – it appears that just under half of all respondents belong to the so­called»flexible middle«(by contrast, 29 per cent are nationally oriented and 22 per cent open to the world). A national orientation is much more prevalent among production workers(44 per cent) and service workers (34 per cent), whereas openness to the world is higher than average among technical(semi-) experts(36 per cent) and socio-cultural(semi-)professionals(33 per cent). HOW POLARISED IS WORKING SOCIETY? The question of how polarised German society really is in relation to attitudes on important political issues has aris­en time and again in recent years and is hotly disputed. So­cial science research has come to the conclusion that we are not dealing with a split society, but that in many re­spects consensus reigns. Based on the well received Trigger Points by Steffen Mau, Thomas Lux and Linus Westheuser, we not only looked at the four arenas of inequality present­ed by the authors, but also calculated the degree of polari­sation pertaining to a political statement assigned to each of the arenas(Mau et al. 2023: 65f). The polarisation index used measures the distribution of attitudes, with values be­tween 0 and 1. The value 0 stands for complete agreement, implying that all respondents chose the same answer cate­gory. A value of 1, by contrast, indicates complete polarisa­tion, in the sense that respondents are distributed half and half between the two extremes. A value of 0.5 indicates that respondents are evenly distributed across all answer categories. Measured values are often very far from the ex­tremes of 0 and 1. It is interesting to compare the respec­tive distributions, however. Higher values indicate a higher degree of polarisation(cf. van der Eijk 2001; Ruedin 2023). Looking at the seven questions on political attitudes we selected it turns out that all the values lie between 0 and 0.5 – in other words, in the range between complete agree­ment and even distribution across all categories. Values higher than 0.5 and heading towards complete polarisation do not occur. This tallies with the findings of other social science surveys, namely that, rather than a polarised socie­ty, it would be more accurate to talk of a society in which attitudes differ on certain issues. The biggest disagreement in this connection concerns the extent to which we might jeopardise economic prosperity by staking everything on combating climate change(level of polarisation 0.450). At­titudes on same-sex marriage point towards consensus, with by far the lowest level of polarisation(0.222). Mau and his team of authors allocate the current soci­etal conflicts to four arenas of inequality(Mau et al. 2023: 47f). The arena of today-tomorrow inequalities pertains to environmental conflicts and time conflicts of the kind that often arise in environmental and climate policy. In­side-outside inequalities concern issues of access and membership of the kind that often arise in connection with migration and integration policy. Top-bottom inequalities are about distribution conflicts such as we often encounter in relation to social, tax and distribution policy. The arena of us-them inequalities concerns recognition conflicts and anti-discrimination. These inequalities often arise in the area of equality and recognition policies. The last four FRIEDRICH-EBERT-STIFTUNG 39