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Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- List of Figures and Tables -- Acknowledgments -- 1 GOVERNMENT BY THE PRIVILEGED -- 2 THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM (IS WRONG) -- 3 WHY DON'T WORKERS RUN? -- 4 WHAT'S STOPPING THEM? -- 5 WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT? -- 6 MOVING THE NEEDLE -- Appendix -- Notes -- References -- Index

White-collar government -- What is class? -- The unequal social class makeup of American political institutions -- The elephant in the room -- Why does class matter? -- The evidence -- Voting with class -- Legislative voting as a window into the importance of class -- Measuring the divisions -- Class and legislative voting today -- Class and legislative voting during the postwar period -- The enduring imprint of class -- Representational inequality in "ayes" and "nays" -- Before the votes are cast -- Legislative entrepreneurs -- The role of class -- Measuring legislative entrepreneurship -- The policies legislators propose -- The policies legislators pass -- Leaving the working class off the agenda -- Class, opinions, and choices -- Out of touch, or out of step? -- Inside the mind of a member of Congress -- The importance of opinions -- Who's out of touch now? -- Out-of-step government -- Economic policy making in class-imbalanced legislatures -- Representation and policy making -- What would a class-balanced Congress have done? -- When the working class holds office -- Blue-collar government -- The economic consequences of white-collar government -- Fixing the broken mirror -- What's keeping the working class out of office? -- Thinking bigger about inequality -- Up front there oughta be a man in black

AbstractPoliticians in the US tend to be vastly better off than the people they represent. But why, and does it matter? In the last decade, scholar of US politics have revived an old line of inquiry into the causes and consequences of government by the privileged, or what I call white-collar government. This article briefly reviews what scholars have learned, and what we still need to know. Most research to date has focused on the effects of government by the privileged; just as the shortage of female politicians seems to bias policy on gender issues, the shortage of politicians from lower-income and working-class backgrounds appears to tilt economic policy in favor of the more conservative positions typically favored by more affluent Americans. Why, then, do so few lower-income and working-class Americans go on to become politicians? On this point, scholars have more hunches than hard evidence.

Working‐class citizens have been numerically underrepresented in policymaking institutions throughout most of America's history. Little is known, however, about the political consequences of this enduring feature of our democratic system. This essay examines the relationship between legislators' class backgrounds and their votes on economic policy in the House of Representatives during the twentieth century. Like ordinary Americans, representatives from working‐class occupations exhibit more liberal economic preferences than other legislators, especially those from profit‐oriented professions. These findings provide the first evidence of a link between the descriptive and substantive representation of social classes in the United States.

Research on the economic backgrounds of politicians is once again flourishing in political science. In this article, we describe the economic characteristics that scholars have recently studied and the common threads that have emerged in modern work on this topic. This growing literature is largely united by a shared concern about the unequal economic makeup of institutions: Recent studies generally agree that politicians tend to be vastly better off than citizens on every economic measure and that politicians from different economic backgrounds tend to think and behave differently in office. However, the literature is far from a consensus regarding why politicians are so economically advantaged. Going forward, there are numerous opportunities for future work to address this gap; to extend the literature to new countries, institutions, and time periods; and to better understand how economic backgrounds intersect with race, gender, and other social characteristics.

Why do so few working-class citizens go on to hold elected office in democracies? This paper tests an explanation motivated by the larger literature on descriptive representation, namely, differences in ascent ambition. Are workers less likely to be personally inclined to run? In this study, we use new data from 10 surveys administered to 13,535 respondents in the Americas to conduct the first cross-national analysis of social class gaps in nascent ambition (and one of the largest studies of nascent ambition to date). We find little evidence of social class differences in standard measures of nascent ambition, although we find substantial gender gaps, consistent with some past research. These findings mirror recent work on the US and suggest that external obstacles—not individual-level differences in nascent ambition—may be responsible for the global shortage of politicians from the working classes.

Academics and political pundits alike attribute rising support for right-wing political options across advanced democracies to the working classes. In the United States, authors claim that the white working class offered unprecedented and crucial support for Donald Trump in the 2016 election. But what is the evidence for this claim? We examine all of the available academic survey data gathered around the election, along with a number of surveys from prior elections. We test four common claims about the white working class in 2016: (1) that most Trump voters were white working-class Americans; (2) that most white working-class voters supported Trump; (3) that unusually large numbers of white working-class voters switched from Obama in 2012 to Trump in 2016; and (4) that white working-class voters were pivotal to Trump's victory in several swing states. We find that three of the four are not supported by the available data, and the other lacks crucial context that casts doubt on the idea that Trump uniquely appealed to working-class Americans. White working-class Americans have been supporting Republican presidential candidates at higher rates in recent elections, but that process long predates 2016, and narratives that center on Trump's alleged appeal obscure this important long-term trend.

In most democracies, lawmakers tend to be vastly better off than the citizens who elect them. Is that because voters prefer more affluent politicians over leaders from working-class backgrounds? In this article, we report the results of candidate choice experiments embedded in surveys in Britain, the United States, and Argentina. Using conjoint designs, we asked voters in these different contexts to choose between two hypothetical candidates, randomly varying several of the candidates' personal characteristics, including whether they had worked in blue-collar or white-collar jobs. Contrary to the idea that voters prefer affluent politicians, the voters in our experiments viewed hypothetical candidates from the working class as equally qualified, more relatable, and just as likely to get their votes. Voters do not seem to be behind the shortage of working-class politicians. To the contrary, British, American, and Argentine voters seem perfectly willing to cast their ballots for working-class candidates.