This is a terrific - if disturbing - post:
John Edwards’s $400 haircut. Senator John McCain’s apparently uncountable houses. President Obama’s vacation in Martha’s Vineyard. Most recently, Mitt Romney’s home renovations. These things suggest that many, if not most, politicians at the federal level come from the upper social classes. Certainly they are much wealthier than the average American. But does the social class of elected leaders actually affect how they vote?
Nicholas Carnes, a political scientist at Duke University, finds that it does. In this forthcoming paper, he studied the connection between the occupational backgrounds of members of Congress from 1901 to 1996 and their voting behavior. Occupational backgrounds have proven to be stronger predictors of many political attitudes than other markers of class, like education and income. (The data he draws upon are here.) He uses a simple seven-category typology: farm owners, businesspeople, other private-sector professionals (like doctors), lawyers, politicians, service-based professionals (like teachers), and workers (industrial, farm and union).
As one might imagine, people from working-class backgrounds were only a small minority during this period. In fact, except for the growing representation of politicians at the expense of lawyers — a shift that derives in part from changes in how the data was coded rather than anything substantive — the occupational backgrounds of members of the House have been remarkably stable.
For both 2301 and 2302 - we ought to consider what this means for the quality of representation in the US.
