White-Collar Government: The Hidden Role of Class in Economic Policy Making by Nicholas Carnes

Author:Nicholas Carnes [Carnes, Nicholas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Politics, Legislative Branch, Economic Policy, Political Science, American Government, State, General
ISBN: 9780226087009
Google: -neCswEACAAJ
Goodreads: 17674315
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 4.4 Can Legislators’ Own Opinions Explain the Social Class Gap in How They Vote on Economic Issues?

Note: Bars report average predicted roll call scores based on regression models that control for a legislator’s last occupation and, where noted, standard controls for other characteristics of the legislator and her constituency and controls for the legislator’s own economic policy opinions. The online appendix lists the complete occupational coefficients for each model. Source: Miller and Stokes ([1958] 1984).

Controlling for legislators’ own views about economic issues accounted for the other half of the gap. The third statistical model summarized in figure 4.4 (“Standard controls and legislator’s econ. preferences”) controlled for the variables in the second model and the measure of legislators’ own views on economic issues from figure 4.3 (as a set of indicator variables). Once I accounted for how lawmakers personally felt about economic issues, the social class gap in how they voted on economic issues vanished. As the third pair of bars in figure 4.4 illustrates, the difference between how the two most economically polarized classes of lawmakers voted was essentially zero (although there were still modest differences between representatives from a few other classes in the full regression model). Lawmakers from different classes tend to think differently about economic issues, and, as a result, they sometimes behave differently in office.

There has never been another survey like the American Representation Study, but if a researcher were to replicate it today, she would probably reach the same conclusions about the links between class, opinions, and choices. As chapters 2 and 3 showed, lawmakers from different classes behave differently today, just as they did in the 1950s. As the State Legislative Survey and the Political Courage Test showed, lawmakers from different classes think differently today, just as they did in the 1950s. And as we know just by listening to modern campaign rhetoric, lawmakers often claim that their backgrounds shape their views and choices today, just as they did in the 1950s. Those from the working class claim that they bring a working-class perspective to office, and those from business backgrounds claim that their “actions . . . simply reflect the pro-business, antiregulatory philosophy” that they developed in that line of work.

The governing environment has changed in important ways in the last half century, of course. However, those changes have not altered two fundamental realities of legislative decision making: lawmakers sometimes base their choices on their own views, and those views are sometimes shaped by the kinds of jobs they had before they held office. Modern lawmakers are ideologically in step with the classes they came from and ideologically out of step with other classes, and they occasionally act accordingly. Just as they always have.18

Who’s Out of Touch Now?

Of course, there have always been at least a few out-of-touch politicians, too. Being out of touch, however, does not seem to be unique to any particular class. And it doesn’t seem to help explain why lawmakers from different classes behave differently in office.

Measuring which legislators are out of touch is naturally challenging.

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