4 - Will Any Worker Do? The Role of Policy in Linking Workers’ Presence to Evaluations of Representatives

Summary

Chapter 4 examines working-class deputies’ propensity to engender positive evaluations of representative institutions conditional on policy proposals of working-class deputies. Using our original survey data, we show that the average citizen believes working-class deputies are more likely to understand the problems they face, and promote policies to address them compared to upper-class deputies. Then we show that citizens represented by working-class deputies who propose specific pro-worker policies are much more likely to positively evaluate their representatives and political institutions. We use an original survey experiment fielded in Argentina and Mexico wherein we directly manipulate deputies’ class background and whether working-class numeric representation is or is not accompanied by policy representation designed to improve the lives of workers. Overall, we find that both the inclusion of working-class representatives, combined with policy representation of workers, has the largest effect on improving how well citizens feel represented. Numeric representation without policy representation, or policy representation without inclusion, only has minor effects.