The Nomination and Electoral Competitiveness of Working Class Candidates in Germany

Abstract

The working classes are underrepresented in nearly every legislature around the world. Here, we examine several understudied questions about working class representation in legislatures. We are interested in which parties nominate working class candidates, and whether voters or parties discriminate against legislative candidates from the working class. Using data on the occupational background of German state legislative candidates, we find extreme left and right parties nominate more working class candidates than traditional centre-left and centre-right parties. We also find working class candidates are less likely to win elections compared to candidates from other socio-economic classes.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s). The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1 We leave it to future research to examine trends over time in the nomination of working class candidates using candidate data.

2 Candidates coded as other/unknown occupation are excluded from the analysis.

3 Overall, we classify 11.9 percent of our sample of candidates as workers. If we were to subdivide those classified as workers according to Oesch and Rennwald (2018), 6.7 percent would be considered production workers, 2 percent would be considered service workers, and 3.1 percent would be considered clerks/office workers.

4 Dual candidacy only applies to the four states with MMP electoral systems: Lower Saxony, Rhineland-Pfalz, Saxony-Anhalt, Schleswig-Holstein.

5 Minor parties that lose all elections and independents are clustered into the ‘Other’ party category.

6 The results are robust if we include all seven occupational categories as independent variables. See Table A2 in the online appendix.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Austin S. Matthews

Austin S. Matthews is a Research Associate at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver. His research focuses on authoritarian regimes, political violence, international conflict, and the politics of Central and Eastern Europe.

Yann P. Kerevel

Yann P. Kerevel is Associate Professor of political science at Louisiana State University. He studies comparative politics with a focus on representation, legislatures, electoral systems and political parties.