Do Voters Discriminate Against Working-Class Candidates?

• In Event: Why are Politicians so Rich?

Abstract

Do voters discriminate against working-class candidates? Past work has assessed voters' class biases through observational and experimental surveys, rather than using actual voting behaviour in real-world elections. Indeed, it is challenging to study voter behaviour using actual electoral results because parties so rarely nominate working-class candidates. This paper draws on an original, complete dataset of candidate occupation self-reports and electoral results from the Canadian province of New Brunswick from 1967 to 2018 (N = 2,673). New Brunswick provides a rare combination of a long, complete time-series of candidate self-reported occupations and substantial variation in candidate class. This combination helps overcome challenges in studying voters' class biases using observational data. I analyze the results using a combination of comparisons of candidates of the same party in the same district when the province used multi-member plurality elections (pre-1974) and differences-in-differences analyses when the province used single-member plurality (post-1974).

Author

• Quinn Albaugh, Queen's University