Scientific article
OA Policy
English

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

First online date2022-01-31
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.

Keywords
  • Descriptive representation
  • Political inequality
  • Social class
  • Survey experiment
  • Voting behaviour
Funding
  • European Commission - Unequal Democracies [741538]
Citation (ISO format)
WÜEST, Reto, PONTUSSON, Harry Jonas. Voter preferences as a source of descriptive (mis)representation by social class. In: European journal of political research, 2022, p. p.1–22. doi: 10.1111/1475-6765.12511
Main files (1)
Article (Published version)
Identifiers
Journal ISSN0304-4130
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518downloads

Technical informations

Creation08/03/2022 04:57:00
First validation08/03/2022 04:57:00
Update16/03/2023 02:55:44
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