Do Working-Class Candidates Win Working-Class Voters?

A new peer-reviewed article, by researchers for the CWCP, provides the best evidence yet.

The Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP) has consistently advocated for recruiting blue-collar political candidates. We’ve argued that these candidates are better able to represent the views of working-class constituents and more likely to campaign in ways that attract working-class voters. That is, they are more likely to speak to working-class interests and values.

But is there good evidence that working-class candidates actually mobilize working-class voters? Well, yes. So says a new peer-reviewed article published in the academic journal Electoral Studies.

The authors, CWCP director Jared Abbott and CWCP researcher Fred DeVeuax ask: “Do working-class candidates activate class-based voting?” To find the answer they designed an experimental conjoint survey that presented subjects with hypothetical Democratic Party Congressional candidates. Respondents were asked to evaluate pairs of candidates who are randomly assigned a set of attributes, including the candidates’ occupation. The goal was to test whether a candidate’s class background divides voter preferences along class lines.

The hypothetical candidate profiles included a number of other characteristics to test which variables were driving class-based voting. The authors concluded:

All else equal, working-class respondents are more likely to prefer candidates with a working-class occupation to a candidate with an upper-class occupation by 6.4 percentage points [emphasis added]. Candidate class polarizes respondents along class lines, as we find no such preference for working-class candidates among middle/upper-class respondents.

We also find that voters value candidate class beyond what they might infer about candidates’ policy preferences or rhetorical appeals from their class background. Instead, working-class respondents prefer working-class candidates because they perceive them as “better understand[ing] problems facing people like me”. Overall, the positive effect of shared class is large and persists even in the presence of other non-class cues: indeed, it is larger than the effect of both shared race and gender (but smaller than highly salient, partisan social issues). Taken together, our findings suggest that candidate class is a powerful cue for voters and has the potential to activate class-based voting.

In short: working-class candidates attract working-class voters.

The findings are, to our knowledge, the best evidence yet for the effect of candidates’ class background on class-based voting. And, as such, provides the firmest ground upon which to argue that recruiting more working-class candidates is key to building a working-class coalition.

To read the whole paper, available with an institutional subscription, click here.

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