Legislator Income, Policy Attitudes, and Voting Behavior

Time: 
08.10.2018 - 12:00 to 13:30
Location : 
A 5,6 Raum A 231
Type of Event : 
AB B-Kolloquium
Lecturer: 
Dr. Jan Rosset
Lecturer affiliation: 
University of Geneva
Description: 

"The study of the impact of legislators’ social and economic backgrounds on their policy preferences and behavior in office has been revived in recent years, fueled by debates on representational inequalities. We contribute to this literature by focusing on the case of Switzerland, which has a non-professional parliament. Taking advantage of the large variation in legislators’ income, we analyze the effect of income on their attitudes as revealed by survey data and their complete voting records from the 2007- 2011 legislative period. Based on an IRT model, we find that legislators who belong to the top income group are significantly more conservative on economic issues than representatives with lower incomes. We find no such effect for sociocultural issues. Furthermore, counterfactual analyses show that for a considerable share of proposals income affects legislators’ voting behavior in nonnegligible ways. This suggests that vote outcomes could be different if the socioeconomic composition of parliament mirrored that of citizens more closely. Therefore, our results are important for our understanding of the impact of the descriptive representation of income groups on their substantive representation. "