Unpacking Status Anxiety – Comparing Fear of Downward Mobility and Worries About Social Devaluation

In times of regressive modernity, characterized by modest prosperity gains and rising inequality, sociologists have increasingly focused on status anxiety, defined as concerns about one’s position in the social hierarchy. However, this umbrella term often conflates conceptually distinct phenomena: (1) future-oriented worries about downward mobility, i.e., concerns about not being able to maintain one’s social status, and (2) present-oriented worries about social devaluation, i.e., being looked down upon by others because of one’s status. It remains unclear whether these two forms together constitute a single anxiety syndrome, or whether they represent empirically distinct dimensions. To untangle this ambiguity, we use data from the German GESIS Panel (2025) with more than 5,000 respondents who assessed both forms of status anxiety simultaneously. We test whether a syndrome character can be supported by (1) investigating intra-individual correlations and the underlying factor structure; (2) assessing whether both worries are similarly prevalent and overlapping in the total and key subpopulations; and (3) examining whether both forms of status anxiety show similar social-structural profiles with regard to vertical characteristics (e.g., income, education) and horizontal characteristics (e.g., age, gender) using regression modelling. Overall, our study provides novel conceptual insight by clarifying whether status anxiety should be understood as a single syndrome or as multiple, distinct status anxieties.