The Poor Political Representation of the Working Class

Zeit: 
29.02.2016 - 12:00 bis 13:30
Ort: 
A 5,6 Raum A 231
Art der Veranstaltung: 
AB B-Kolloquium
Vortragende/r: 
Prof. Dr. Armin Schäfer
Zugehörigkeit des Vortragenden: 
Universität Osnabrück
Beschreibung: 

In this presentation I contribute to the burgeoning debate about the underrepresentation of the working class in politics. In the first section I discuss the theory of group representation and look at recent empirical studies of responsiveness that have begun to disaggregate public opinion by sociodemographic categories such as income or education. In the empirical section, I first show how unequal political participation between social classes has become in Germany. In a second step, I analyze a dataset of more than 500 survey items collected between 1998 and 2013. This analysis shows that respondents within one social class are more similar to each other than to members of other classes and that class-based differences outweigh those of education, region, or gender. Since workers’ opinions tend to differ from the opinions of those groups who are well represented in parliament, their numerical underrepresentation might bias decisions against them. The final part of the presentation argues that this is exactly what is happening. Political decisions are biased against lower classes and almost exclusively reflect the opinions of the better-off.