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

Abstract

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.

A Leader Who Sees the World as I Do: Voters Prefer Candidates Whose Statements Reveal Matching Social‐Psychological Attitudes

“…Indeed, this is the first evidence that voters exhibit homophily in core social‐psychological attitudes when choosing political candidates. Although voter homophily has been classically discussed in terms of detecting underlying values of politicians (Caprara & Zimbardo, 2004), it had only previously been demonstrated experimentally vis‐à‐vis demographics (Schwarz & Coppock, 2020; Wüest & Pontusson, 2018), issue positions (Hanretty et al, 2020), and on a correlational basis in the case of personality (Aichholzer & Willmann, 2020; Caprara et al, 2017). We did not observe demographic homophily here in terms of gender, but we did observe strong, consistent patterns of homophily on traits that capture social emotions (trust, collective nostalgia), social perceptions (populist sentiment, nationalism), and particularly social commitments (national identification, authoritarianism, social dominance orientation).…”

“…More recently, the use of conjoint experiments, involving the randomized presentation of candidates or party profiles that vary along multiple attributes, have yielded insights on which candidate characteristics cause respondents to select one candidate over another (Hainmueller et al, 2014). Some of these studies have demonstrated the effect of candidates taking different policy positions (Hanretty et al, 2020; Horiuchi et al, 2018), while others have revealed the relative impact of gender, race, class, occupation, and education levels on candidate preference and vote choice (e.g., Carnes & Lupu, 2016; Gift & Lastra‐Anadón, 2018; Marx & Schumacher, 2018; Schwarz & Coppock, 2020; Wüest & Pontusson, 2018).…”

“…Designs involving the randomized presentation of candidate characteristics make it possible to consider the effects of such characteristics conditional on the characteristics of respondents and to search for any differential effects among particular voter groups. Using this approach, partisanship and left–right ideology emerge as moderators of the effects of candidate characteristics (Carnes & Lupu, 2016; Gift & Lastra‐Anadón, 2018; Schwarz & Coppock, 2020), and a general pattern of homophily emerges, in which voters prefer candidates who match them on key demographic characteristics (Schwarz & Coppock, 2020; Wüest & Pontusson, 2018) as well as on political‐issue positions (Hanretty et al, 2020).…”

Do political duos diminish discriminatory voter preferences? Evidence from a combined conjoint experiment

“…The effect of having more than one leader has received scant academic attention despite the growing importance of these tandems. On the contrary, knowledge about citizens’ preferences for individual political candidates has grown enormously in recent years, even in contexts where elections are typically a matter of choice of lists (Christensen et al, 2021; Dahl and Nyrup, 2021; Lavezzolo et al, 2021; Mares and Visconti, 2020; Ono and Yamada, 2020; Wüest and Pontusson, 2022). One of the most robust findings of this literature has to do with gender.…”

Double penalty? How candidate class and gender influence voter evaluations

“…Our research makes a vital contribution to the emerging literature on working-class representation (Barnes et al, 2023;Carnes, 2020;Wüest and Pontusson, 2022) by exploring the dynamics of gender and class interconnectedness in candidate evaluation. Most importantly, our findings highlight the importance of a gendered perspective to understanding class representation by showing that voters perceive a working-class background as a red flag particularly when evaluating women candidates.…”