17:45 - 20:00
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Zachary Greene
Discussant/s:
Zachary Greene
Meeting Room G

Yesola Kweon, Jeong Hyun Kim
When Do Women Voters See Themselves in Female Representatives?: Examining the Class Effects of Gender Gender Representation

Luca Bellodi
A Gendered Budget: Descriptive Representation in the Italian Municipalities

Vered Porzycki, Reut Itzkovitch-Malka
Gendered Political Institutions: Understanding Female Legislators’ Experience of the Parliamentary Space and Their Behavioural Strategies

Daniel Butler, Elin Naurin, Patrik Öhberg
Constituents Ask Female Legislators to do More
When Do Women Voters See Themselves in Female Representatives?: Examining the Class Effects of Gender Gender Representation
Yesola Kweon 1, Jeong Hyun Kim 2
1 Utah State University
2 Louisiana State University

Legislatures are dominated by wealthy, white-collar individuals, while the vast majority of the electorate are working-class. In particular, remarkably few women representatives in the US come from working-class backgrounds (less than 1%) while about 12\% of male representatives have working-class backgrounds. The severe underrepresentation of working-class women is because working-class women face double barriers, gender and class, to the development of political career. Working-class women are less endowed with financial resources and networks that enable their candidacy, compared to elite women. At the same time, differences in social roles give women, particularly working-class women, greater caregiving responsibilities, imposing greater constraints than working-class men. Why is it important to have more working-class women in political office? How can we improve the democratic norms and practices by electing more working-class women in office? Using survey experiments, this project answers these questions by (1) explaining how working-class women candidates might mobilize a broader support from the electorate thereby contributing to women's political power and (2) identifying electoral opportunities for working-class women candidates.