It’s on the House: Working-Class MCs’ Impact on Congressional Evaluations

• In Event: Gender & Public Opinion

Abstract

Despite the common assumption in mainstream media that the working class is a bunch of old white men, working class legislators and voters are more likely to be women of color than any other demographic group (Carnes 2015). Our understanding of the effects of descriptive representation on political efficacy and trust is therefore problematic without an intersectional framework. It is impossible to isolate race, class, or gender at the constituent or elite level (Crenshaw 1989). As social identities condition one another, I utilized online survey experiments to assess how the political efficacy and trust of various social groups is a function of the descriptive representation of the working-class, women, and BIPOC in Congress. In fact, the results demonstrate that a rise in gender, racial, and class (GRC) based descriptive representation in Congress, compared to just an uptick in gender and racial descriptive representation, increases self-identified working-class women of color’s political efficacy. The effects of increasing GRC descriptive representation in Congress are heterogenous. Working-class women of color evaluated Congress in a different manner than other social identity groups because working-class women of color placed a larger emphasis on amplifying marginalized voices. Neverless, despite the heterogenous effects of descriptive representation in Congress, estimated political trust and efficacy levels for all social identity groups increased with more GRC descriptive representation. Greater GRC descriptive representation therefore paints a promising future for future generations of Americans due to its potential to cultivate democratic legitimacy in the United States Congress.

Author

• Ashley Sorensen, University of Minnesota