11:20 - 13:00
P2-S39
Room: 0A.05
Chair/s:
Christine Lipsmeyer
Discussant/s:
Sirus Håfström Dehdari
The Substantive Cues of Candidates’ Class: Insights from Brazil
P2-S39-5
Presented by: Alon Yakter
Alon Yakter 1, Mafalda Pratas 2, Jorge Fernandes 3
1 Tel Aviv University
2 European University Institute
3 Institute of Public Goods and Politics, CSIC

While the descriptive representation of gender and ethnic identities has been extensively analyzed in recent research, the role of candidates’ class has received much less attention. Candidates often use their class identities, including social origins and occupational and educational backgrounds, as electoral cues on the campaign trail. Existing research highlights that voters value candidates' class markers because of valence considerations such as group affinity and representational qualities. However, we argue that a candidate's class identity also appeals to substantive policy and ideological content. Specifically, we suggest that voters use candidates’ class identity to infer the candidate's substantive goals, distributive commitments, and policy preferences on multiple issues. We test our hypotheses using an original survey with embedded experiments in Brazil, a highly unequal society with relatively weak partisanship, where the social and electoral value of class identities is most likely to be meaningful. We show that voters use candidates' class identities in addition to partisan and ideological platforms to make electoral choices and we examine which groups of voters are most likely to do so. Our study highlights the electoral value of class identities and its strategic value for candidates and parties. We expect class identities to be particularly relevant for ideologically centrist voters, ambivalent and cross-pressured voters, and for candidates in counter-stereotypical ideological positions (e.g., a working-class candidate running for a right-wing party). Our conclusions contribute to current debates about symbolic and substantive representation and the role of class vis-a-vis other identities.
Keywords: Representation, Class, Brazil, Voter Preferences, Survey Experiment

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