Like Them Rich? Public Perceptions and Opinions of Politicians' Wealth

• In Event: The Class Backgrounds of Elected Representatives

Abstract

The political class around the world is dominated by the wealthy. While there is substantial variation across countries, politicians are on average much wealthier than the citizens they represent (Krcmaric, Nelson, and Roberts, 2021; Carnes and Lupu, 2015). What are the causes and consequences of such overrepresentation of wealth among political elites? The wealthy, especially the very affluent, are electorally advantaged when campaign finance rules allow for more private money in politics (Motolinia, Klasnja, and Weschle, 2023), benefitting the deeper pockets, lower opportunity costs, and better donor connections that the wealthy enjoy (Carnes, 2020; Gerber, 1998). Structural factors like economic inequality may also contribute by deepening the resource divide between the haves and the rest. Wealthier politicians tend to have more conservative preferences (Eggers and Klasnja, 2020), and are less familiar with the economic challenges faced by the poor (Pereira, 2020; Thal, 2017). Perhaps as a consequence, they tend to preside over less redistributive policies (Klasnja and Motolinia, 2023) and are more likely to prioritize policies favorable to businesses and other affluent interests (Carnes, 2013; Kirkland, 2023; Szakonyi, 2021). In sum, the evidence suggests that the descriptive misrepresentation of wealth tends to translate into substantive misrepresentation. But what role does the populace play? Politicians' preferences whatever their wealth should in principle be constrained by the public. How effective may the public be in doing so? We expect that the public can contribute to constraining the misrepresentation of wealth only if: (a) voters are aware of the wealth of candidates; (b) they understand how wealth may affect office-holders' policy preferences and how such preferences may differ from voters' own policy views; and (c) office-holders' wealth is a factor that influences voters' choice. In line with this framework, our project seeks to answer the following questions: How familiar is the populace with the wealth of their political representatives? What is the public's preferred distribution of wealth of office-holders? Do voters prefer wealthier politicians? Do they expect wealthier politicians to enact different policies, and if so, do they in turn adjust their own preferences? Based on our framework and prior work (Chauchard, Klasnja, and Harish, 2019; Carnes and Lupu, 2016), our expectations are that the public prefers a less wealthy elite than the status quo but has limited awareness of it. We do not expect voters to have a primitive preference for wealthier candidates, and when primed with information about their actual wealth, they may even prefer less wealthy politicians over wealthier ones. Moreover, we expect the public to exhibit beliefs that politicians' wealth influences their policy preferences in theoretically predictable ways, and such beliefs may induce subsets of the public to adjust their own policy preferences and priorities. To evaluate these expectations, we run original survey experiments in the US, Brazil, Chile, and, India -- countries that cover a broad spectrum of descriptive (mis)representation of wealth but differ in terms of other socioeconomic, institutional, and political factors that influence public opinion. To the extent that our results bear similarities across countries, running parallel surveys ensures that our conclusions are not country- or context-specific.

Authors

• Lucia Motolinia, Washington University in St Louis

• Marko Klasnja, Georgetown University