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

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

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Authors

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 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
Publisher Elsevier
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 63
Article Number 102093
DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2019.102093

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