Working paper
OA Policy
English

Descriptive misrepresentation by social class: Do voter preferences matter?

PublisherGenève
Collection
  • Unequal Democracies Working Papers; 1
Publication date2018
Abstract

This paper presents the results of a conjoint survey experiment in which Swiss citizens were asked to choose among parliamentary candidates distinguished by occupation, education, and income. Existing survey-experimental literature on this topic suggests that voters are indifferent to the class profiles of candidates or biased against candidates with high-status occupations and incomes. We find that the bias against upper middle-class candidates holds only for citizens in the lower half of the education/income distribution and that all voters are biased against low-skill working-class candidates. We also find that ideological proximity matters greatly to voter preferences for different candidates. Partisan polarization renders the class profile of candidates less salient to voters and might be a source of cross-national variation in descriptive misrepresentation by social income.

Citation (ISO format)
PONTUSSON, Harry Jonas, WUEST, Reto. Descriptive misrepresentation by social class: Do voter preferences matter? 2018
Main files (1)
Working paper
accessLevelPublic
Identifiers
  • PID : unige:116599
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268downloads

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Creation04/04/2019 09:31:00
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