Are there social class gaps in nascent political ambition?: survey evidence from the americas

Rapport Working paper Are there social class gaps in nascent political ambition?: survey evidence from the americas eng 2021 author Carnes Nicholas author Lupu Noam 936487 48 10.1086/734284 Why do so few working-class citizens go on to hold elected office in democracies? This paper tests an explanation motivated by the larger literature on descriptive representation, namely, differences in ascent ambition. Are workers less likely to be personally inclined to run? In this study, we use new data from 10 surveys administered to 13,535 respondents in the Americas to conduct the first cross-national analysis of social class gaps in nascent ambition (and one of the largest studies of nascent ambition to date). We find little evidence of social class differences in standard measures of nascent ambition, although we find substantial gender gaps, consistent with some past research. These findings mirror recent work on the US and suggest that external obstacles—not individual-level differences in nascent ambition—may be responsible for the global shortage of politicians from the working classes. European Commission Unequal Democracies EU H2020 true 378bab16-c02f-4dd1-9b27-71826df9c57a Working paper Public wp21.pdf 1597273 application/pdf openAccess

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Are there social class gaps in nascent political ambition?: survey evidence from the americas				2021	353	564

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