A class of their own: parliamentarians are less likely to be perceived as working class

Abstract

In order to understand the relevance of class politics and the changing composition of our politicians, we must first understand how the public derive their views of social class and, importantly, that of their elected representatives. If the social class of representatives is to matter, the public must be able to at least partly accurately infer the social class of representatives. This article addresses that question through a large conjoint experiment conducted in Britain (N = 4157). In addition to a wide range of social class cues, participants were randomly exposed to distinct information conditions where statements about the hypothetical profiles under consideration were of individuals with political experience or not. The findings reveal meaningful differences in how social class markers are perceived between Members of Parliament (MPs) and the general public. Notably, MPs are consistently viewed as less working class, even when they possess identical working-class attributes to an average member of the public. These results have implications for understanding how people derive the social class of others, especially elected representatives. The latter is important: the perceptual gap underscores a fundamental dilemma for the promotion of working-class representation in politics as working-class MPs are likely to struggle to be recognised as authentic representatives of the class groups they descriptively represent.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Daniel Devine: orcid.org/0000-0002-0335-1776

ORCID for Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte: orcid.org/0000-0002-9330-3945

ORCID for Matt Ryan: orcid.org/0000-0002-8693-5063

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