Am 24.04., 18 Uhr s.t. im Raum GFG 01-721 ist Professor Dr. Noam Lupu (Vanderbilt) zu Gast im Institutskolloquium. Alle Institutsmitglieder (und insbesondere auch die Studierenden) sind herzlich eingeladen! Es geht um die nachteiligen Folgen der Unterrepräsentation von Arbeitenden für die Demokratie.
Bio: Noam Lupu is Associate Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University, the Associate Director of the LAPOP Lab, and also a Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. His research interests include comparative political behaviour, political parties and partisanship, congruence and representation, legacies of political violence, and class and inequality.
Abstract: In most democracies, politicians are economically better off than the citizens they
represent: they are wealthier and more educated, and almost none of them come from
the working-class occupations that make up majorities of most labor forces. These
inequalities in the makeup of government in turn appear to have significant
consequences for economic policy. But no one really knows why so few working-class
people go on to hold public office in electoral democracies around the world. We
argue that electoral democracy itself has unique, built-in biases that discourage
working-class people from going on to hold office. We draw on dozens of original
surveys in the Americas; interviews with party leaders in Africa, Latin America, and
Scandinavia; and the first-ever global database of information on the occupational
backgrounds of national legislators in the world's democracies. With these data, we
argue that standing for elected office in any democracy is a burden that requires a
person to give up precious resources: time, energy, and certainty about the future.
As a result, relatively resource-poor social groups, like the working class, are
simply less likely to be able to run or to win office. These burdens also make
working-class people less appealing to the party leaders and other institutional
gatekeepers who could, in principle, help working-class people get into office. The
conditions necessary for workers to hold office in large numbers are truly
extraordinary: in rare cases, parties, interest groups, and labor unions have
strategic or ideological reasons to target and subsidize working-class candidate
entry, but outside of these unusual political moments, working-class representation
is typically low or close to zero in democracies. Scholars and practitioners often
think of descriptive representation as fluid, or that it might even exhibit positive
feedback, but we argue that the basic operation of electoral democracy builds in
disadvantages for working-class representation.