Why do so few working-class people go on to hold elected office? In the average democracy, working-class jobs make up about seventy percent of occupations, but only two percent of national legislators come from working-class job. In Keeping Workers Off the Ballot, Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu show that this disparity is not because working-class people are less appealing to voters, less interested in running, or less qualified. And the problem isn鈥檛 limited to certain countries, campaign finance regimes, or electoral systems. Carnes and Lupu argue that it is the nature of elections themselves that keep workers out our ballots and out of office.
Carnes and Lupu point to two inherent features of elections that discourage working-class candidates. Running for office naturally involves taking on significant personal burdens鈥攇iving up time, energy, and certainty about the future鈥攖hat are prohibitive to people in such lower-wage, labor-intensive, and more precarious occupations as manual laborer, retail clerk, and home health aide. Party gatekeepers in turn have strategic incentives to favor potential candidates who can more easily meet the demands of running, and as a result, they pass over qualified working-class people. Carnes and Lupu argue that workers won鈥檛 have a seat at the table in our political system unless parties form institutionalized partnerships with strong worker organizations or democracies embrace alternative forms of leadership selection that directly harness the perspectives of ordinary citizens.
Nicholas Carnes is the Z. Smith Reynolds Professor of Public Policy and professor of political science and sociology at Duke University. He is the author of White-Collar Government and The Cash Ceiling (快色直播). Noam Lupu is the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of Political Science and director of the Center for Global Democracy at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Party Brands in Crisis and the coeditor of Unequal Democracies.
“This exceptional book makes an important contribution for scholars and students, as well as for policymakers and a broader audience interested in understanding who gets to run for office and why. It develops the most compelling general theory of working-class underrepresentation to date, linking this phenomenon to fundamental features of democratic design.”—Lucia Motolinia, author of Unity Through Particularism: How Electoral Reforms Influence Parties and Legislative Behavior
“The data the authors present about the severe underrepresentation of the working class in political office is completely convincing, and indeed, sadly, not all that surprising. What makes the book so strong is that this is the starting point of the manuscript, as opposed to its key result, and the rest of the book is devoted to developing and testing a theory of what exactly explains this underrepresentation so that we can begin to think about how to address it.”—Joshua Tucker, coauthor of Communism’s Shadow: Historical Legacies and Contemporary Political Attitudes
“An impressive, clear-eyed account of a major flaw in the world’s electoral democracies—their massive underrepresentation of working people.”—Larry M. Bartels, Vanderbilt University
“A critically important book at a critically important historical moment. The voices of the working class are muted in almost every advanced democracy. This book explains why. The near absence of the working class from legislative office at the national level, along with its minuscule presence at lower levels, derives from structural conditions that, unaddressed, will always persist. The analysis suggests practical, feasible steps to bring working class presence, voices and perspectives directly into democratic politics. Everyone who cares about democracy today should read this book.”—Jane Mansbridge, Harvard University
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