6 - How Do Citizens Know Workers Are in Office?

Summary

Chapter 6 addresses our final question: How do voters know workers are in office? Our theory argues that even though citizens are unlikely to know the exact share of seats workers occupy in office, they are generally aware of working-class representation. Drawing on campaign material, candidate websites, and social media websites, we show that both parties and individual politicians have an incentive to showcase politicians’ class status. Then we present qualitative evidence from publicly available data, coupled with an inventory of government websites, to show that even absent these political incentives, information on candidates’ class background is publicly available and – at least some of this information – makes it into the hands of citizens, thanks to popular press. Then we turn to evidence from two survey experiments from Argentina and Mexico that were designed to evaluate whether citizens can glean information about deputies’ class status from facial images alone. We demonstrate that participants can correctly identify the class background of the national deputies depicted in photographs at a rate significantly better than chance.