About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

LOG IN
LOG IN


59 Am. J. Pol. Sci. 1 (2015)

handle is hein.journals/amjorpolisci59 and id is 1 raw text is: Rethinking the Comparative Perspective on Class and Representation: Evidence from Latin America Nicholas Carnes Duke University Noam Lupu University of Wisconsin-Madison Does it matter that working-class citizens are numerically underrepresented in political offices throughout the world? For decades, the conventional wisdom in comparative politics has been that it does not, that lawmakers from different classes think and behave roughly the same in office. In this article, we argue that this conclusion is misguided. Past research relied on inappropriate measures of officeholders' class backgrounds, attitudes, and choices. Using data on 18 Latin American legislatures, we show that lawmakersfrom different classes bring different economic attitudes to the legislative process. Using data on one least likely case, we also show thatpre-voting decisions like sponsoring legislation often differ dramatically along social class lines, even when political parties control higher-visibility decisions like roll-call votes. The unequal numerical or descriptive representation of social classes in the world's legislatures has important consequences for the substantive representation of different class interests. n most countries, political decision makers are drawn disproportionately from the top strata of society. As Matthews (1985, 18) noted a quarter century ago, almost everywhere legislators are better educated, pos- sess higher-status occupations, and have more privileged backgrounds than the people they 'represent.' Citizens from the working class-from manual labor and service industry jobs-rarely hold office. People from white- collar professions do most of the work in the world's legislatures (e.g., Best 2007; Best and Cotta 2000). Although these inequalities in the numerical or de- scriptive representation (Pitkin 1967) of social classes are a defining feature of political life in most countries, we still know little about how they affect the substantive rep- resentation of different classes' interests. Does the near absence of the working class in legislatures affect who wins and who loses in the policymaking process? Schol- ars briefly pondered this question in the 1960s and 1970s, but research on this topic came to a halt after a handful of studies suggested that policymakers from different classes behave about the same in office. Ever since, the idea that legislators' class backgrounds are irrelevant has been the conventional wisdom in the study of comparative politics. There are signs that this wisdom should be revisited. As scholars of legislative decision making have shifted their attention from roll-callvoting to other activities like sponsoring legislation, they have begun to recognize that policy makers have far more personal discretion than re- searchers once believed (e.g., Parker 1992). Recent work on legislators' gender and ethnicity has shown that the Nicholas Carnes is Assistant Professor of Public Policy, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University, Box 90245, Durham, NC 27708-0245 (nicholas.carnes@duke.edu). Noam Lupu is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Trice Faculty Scholar, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 110 North Hall, 1050 Bascom Mall, Madison, WI 53706 (lupu@wisc.edu). We thank Ernesto Calvo, Wonjae Hwang, SebastiAn Saiegh, and Cesar Zucco for generously sharing their data; the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) and its major supporters (the United States Agency for International Development, the United Nations Devel- opment Program, the Inter-American Development Bank, and Vanderbilt University) for making their data available; David Broockman, Matt Cleary, Ivan Llamazares, seminar participants at Hebrew University, Salamanca, and Wisconsin, and the anonymous reviewers and editor for helpful comments; Luis Martinez for assistance gathering data; and Santiago Battezzati, Renata Dinamarco, Alfonso Echezarra, Matias Giannoni, Thiago Nascimento, Victoria Paniagua, and Graziele Silotto for excellent research assistance. Carnes acknowledges the generous support of the DeWitt Wallace Center for Media and Democracy and the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. Lupu acknowledges the generous support of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame and the Center for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences at the Juan March Institute. We presented a previous version of this article at the 2012 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association. Replication materials for the empirical analysis in this article are available in the AJPS Data Archive on Dataverse (http://dvn.iq.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/ajps) and the authors' websites. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are our own. American Journal ofPolitical Science, Vol. 59, No. 1, January 2015, Pp. 1-18 92014, Midwest Political Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12112 1