Do humble beginnings help? How politician class roots shape voter evaluations

Author(s)
Nick Vivyan, Markus Wagner, Konstantin Glinitzer, Jakob-Moritz Eberl
Abstract

Motivated partly by descriptive representation concerns, political scientists have become increasingly interested in voters' preferences over the social class of their representatives. Whereas existing research focuses mainly on preferences concerning politicians' own immediate class markers, we argue that voters may also care about politician class roots - the social class of the household in which a politician grew up. Drawing on conjoint experiments fielded in Austria, Germany, and Britain, we show that in the latter two cases voters do care about class roots, displaying an average preference for politicians with more humble class roots. In followup experiments testing different explanations for this preference we find little evidence that voters treat humble roots as a signal of social mobility and therefore politician quality. Rather, preferences over class roots appear to be driven by class affinity biases. Our findings have implications for debates concerning the descriptive underrepresentation of the working classes.

Organisation(s)
Department of Government, Department of Communication
External organisation(s)
Durham University
Journal
Electoral Studies
Volume
63
No. of pages
13
ISSN
0261-3794
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2019.102093
Publication date
2019
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
506014 Comparative politics
Keywords
ASJC Scopus subject areas
Political Science and International Relations
Portal url
https://ucris.univie.ac.at/portal/en/publications/do-humble-beginnings-help-how-politician-class-roots-shape-voter-evaluations(51eb53d8-c881-492d-b091-0584e87fdaca).html