The Causes: What Keeps Workers Out of Office?
If it matters that working-class people so rarely go on to hold office, what exactly keeps workers out?
Observers have sometimes speculated that there is something wrong with working-class people themselves: that workers are less qualified, less interested in running, or less appealing to voters. These kinds of explanations might ease concerns about the lack of workers in public office by portraying the shortage as an unavoidable practical necessity, a “necessary evil.” But there has never been much concrete evidence that workers themselves are to blame for their near absence in our political institutions. Working-class Americans are not measurably less qualified to serve their communities, and when they hold office they tend to be about as effective as other leaders and about as likely to win reelection.18 In national surveys, qualified working-class people are about as likely to say that they have considered running for office.19 And in hypothetical candidate experiments as well as actual elections, working-class candidates are about as likely to win over voters.20
Another common strain of thought blames the shortage of workers on recent changes in U.S. politics, like the rising cost of campaigns and elections or the decline of labor unions. However, workers have always been numerically underrepresented in American institutions, even during eras when unions were stronger and campaigning was less expensive. Looking across modern democracies around the world, moreover, workers are similarly underrepresented in countries with stronger labor unions and less-expensive campaigns.21
By far the most important reason so few workers hold office is simply that so few run in the first place. One recent study found that people from working-class jobs made up just 1 percent of the candidates who ran in U.S. House primary elections from 2008 to 2016.22
Why do so few workers run? The first reason is that running is personally burdensome, and people who have working-class jobs are the least well-positioned to take on those burdens.23 Although many jobs are extremely demanding, working-class jobs are also uniquely precarious: they pay less, offer less certainty about the future, and provide less flexibility. Not surprisingly, in national surveys about running for office, one of the biggest dividing lines between people in working-class jobs and others is that workers are more likely to say that they can’t run for office because they can’t give up their income or job. (In contrast, other concerns tend to be universal; for instance, similar percentages of workers and white-collar professionals say they dread the thought of campaign fundraising.)
Workers face a harder road, and the party elites who could help them know it. This is the second major obstacle that keeps working-class people out of office. In surveys, qualified workers are far less likely than equally qualified white-collar professionals to say that they have been encouraged to run for office by party leaders, interest groups, sitting politicians, journalists, and other political insiders. Party leaders say the same. Many express a desire to run more candidates from the working class but admit that they hesitate because they fear workers will have a harder time. Gatekeepers have limited resources and naturally prioritize candidates who will have an easier time running. As a result, party leaders and other gatekeepers—even those who care about worker representation—tend to pass over qualified workers in favor of professionals who will have an easier time running.24
Labor unions have sometimes been able to help workers overcome some of these challenges. In countries like Germany and the United Kingdom, unions formed close alliances with strong political parties in the early twentieth century, allowing them to support working-class candidates and to ensure that gatekeepers prioritized them. Unions have sometimes played a similar role in the United States, at least at the local level, but these efforts have often been short-lived. The United States has never had a German- or UK-style partnership between unions and national party organizations to promote working-class officeholding.25
Current Reform Proposals Miss the Problem
Unfortunately, some reform proposals that are commonly linked to worker representation don’t address the key barriers that keep workers out of office.
For instance, the National Conference of State Legislatures advocates increasing salaries for lawmakers and lists as one benefit that higher salaries will “attract highly qualified candidates with a variety of diverse backgrounds and experiences, while also ensuring that everyone—rich or poor—can afford to serve.”26 In reality, however, workers don’t run or hold office at higher rates in states that pay their lawmakers higher salaries.27 Raising salaries might make running more appealing to working-class people, but it makes running more appealing to professionals, too. If workers have concerns about the size of the prize for winning, they are decidedly secondary to the impossibility of running the race in the first place and the lack of support from elite gatekeepers who could help. Raising legislative salaries might be a good idea for many other reasons, but there is currently no empirical research to suggest that this approach will increase worker representation by itself (or at all).
Another common claim is that implementing systems of public financing in U.S. elections would increase worker representation. Again, these kinds of interventions may have many important benefits for our democracy, but public financing doesn’t seem to address the key problems that keep workers out of office (the inherent burdens and uncertainty associated with running, regardless of the financing system, and the lack of support from political gatekeepers). When public financing systems have been implemented in U.S. states, worker representation does not seem to have improved,28 and worker representation differs only marginally in other countries with more extensive public financing systems.29
Likewise, reformers sometimes argue that changing our electoral system to a proportional representation system (in which parties receive seats in Congress, for instance, in proportion to their share of the vote) would promote worker representation better than the single-member-district majoritarian system we currently use (in which the candidate who receives the most votes in a given state or district wins the seat). However, cross-national research suggests that proportional representation would do little to increase worker officeholding; countries with proportional representation systems do not have more working-class people in their national legislatures.30
None of these approaches address the core obstacles facing workers: Running for office is personally burdensome, and so party leaders and other elites who could help instead tend to pass over qualified workers in favor of professional candidates who will have an easier time running.