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

Autor(en)

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

Abstrakt

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(en)

Institut für Staatswissenschaft, Institut für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft

Externe Organisation(en)

Durham University

Journal

Electoral Studies

Band

63

Anzahl der Seiten

13

ISSN

0261-3794

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2019.102093

Publikationsdatum

2019

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

506014 Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft

Schlagwörter

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Political Science and International Relations

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/do-humble-beginnings-help-how-politician-class-roots-shape-voter-evaluations(51eb53d8-c881-492d-b091-0584e87fdaca).html