Do Humble Beginnings Help? How Politician Class Roots Shape Voter Evaluations

Vivyan, Nick; Wagner, Markus; Glinitzer, Konstantin; Moritz-Eberl, Jakob

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 follow-up 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.

Citation

Vivyan, N., Wagner, M., Glinitzer, K., & Moritz-Eberl, J. (2020). Do Humble Beginnings Help? How Politician Class Roots Shape Voter Evaluations. Electoral Studies, 63, Article 102093. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2019.102093

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 11, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Nov 1, 2019
• Publication Date: 2020-02
• Deposit Date: Oct 21, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: May 1, 2021
• Journal: Electoral Studies
• Print ISSN: 0261-3794
• Electronic ISSN: 1873-6890
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 63
• Article Number: 102093
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2019.102093
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1317608