Voter preferences as a source of descriptive (mis)representation by social class

This paper presents the results of a conjoint survey experiment in which Swiss citizens were asked to choose among parliamentary candidates with different class profiles determined by occupation, education and income. Existing survey-experimental literature on this topic suggests that respondents are indifferent to the class profiles of candidates or biased against candidates with high-status occupations and high incomes. We find that respondents are biased against upper middle-class candidates as well as routine working-class candidates. While the bias against upper middle-class candidates is primarily a bias among working-class individuals, the bias against routine working-class candidates is most pronounced among middle-class individuals. Our supplementary analysis of observational data confirms the bias against routine working-class candidates, but not the bias against upper middle-class candidates.publishedVersio

Toward a Socialism for the Future, in the Wake of the Demise of the Socialism of the Past

http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51230/1/464.pd

Inequality and Politics Survey

Unequal Democracies is a five-year research program, directed by Jonas Pontusson and funded by the European Research Council (Advanced Grant 741538). Started in September, 2017, the Unequal Democracies Project explores how rising income and wealth inequality affects the way that political processes in liberal democracies work. Our core premise is that two distinct streams of recent research must be brought together in order to address this overarching question of how income and wealth inequality affects democratic politics. One of these research streams focuses on how inequality affects the policy preferences of different citizens; the other research stream addresses the effects of inequality on the responsiveness of parties and governments to the policy preferences of different citizens