Government by the Privileged

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Nicholas Carnes
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Service Industry ◽  
White Collar ◽  
The United States ◽  
Manual Labor ◽  
Democratic Process ◽  
The People ◽  
Political Office ◽  
Labor Service

This chapter opens the discussion on why working-class Americans—people employed in manual labor, service industry, or clerical jobs—almost never go on to hold political office in the United States. It suggests that the economic gulf between politicians and the people they represent—a so-called government by the privileged or white-collar government—has serious consequences for the American democratic process. Although journalists and scholars have always had hunches about what keeps working-class Americans out of office, to date there has been almost no actual research on why the United States is governed by the privileged or what reformers might do about it. This book tries to change that. It argues that workers are less likely to hold office not because they are unqualified or because voters prefer more affluent candidates, but because workers are simply less likely to run for public office in the first place.

Do Voters Dislike Working-Class Candidates? Voter Biases and the Descriptive Underrepresentation of the Working Class

2016 ◽  
Vol 110 (4) ◽  
pp. 832-844 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICHOLAS CARNES ◽  
NOAM LUPU
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Personal Characteristics ◽  
White Collar ◽  
Choice Experiments ◽  
The United States ◽  
Blue Collar

In most democracies, lawmakers tend to be vastly better off than the citizens who elect them. Is that because voters prefer more affluent politicians over leaders from working-class backgrounds? In this article, we report the results of candidate choice experiments embedded in surveys in Britain, the United States, and Argentina. Using conjoint designs, we asked voters in these different contexts to choose between two hypothetical candidates, randomly varying several of the candidates’ personal characteristics, including whether they had worked in blue-collar or white-collar jobs. Contrary to the idea that voters prefer affluent politicians, the voters in our experiments viewed hypothetical candidates from the working class as equally qualified, more relatable, and just as likely to get their votes. Voters do not seem to be behind the shortage of working-class politicians. To the contrary, British, American, and Argentine voters seem perfectly willing to cast their ballots for working-class candidates.

Middle-Class Victorian Street Arabs: Modern Re-creations of the Baker Street Irregulars

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dominic Cheetham
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Children's Literature ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Street Children ◽  
Children’S Literature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Upward Shift

In three of Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories there are brief appearances of the Baker Street Irregulars, a group of ‘street Arabs’ who help Holmes with his investigations. These children have been re-imagined in modern children's literature in at least twenty-seven texts in a variety of media and with writers from both Britain and the United States. All these modern stories show a marked upward shift in the class of the Irregulars away from the lower working class of Conan-Doyle's originals. The shift occurs through attributing middle-class origins to the leaders of the Irregulars, through raising the class of the Irregulars in general, and through giving the children life environments more comfortable, safe, and financially secure than would have been possible for late-Victorian street children. Because of the variety in texts and writers, it is argued that this shift is not a result of the conscious political or ideological positions of individual writers, but rather reflects common unconscious narrative choices. The class-shift is examined in relation to the various pressures of conventions in children's literature, concepts of audience, and common concepts of class in society.

Populism and Liberal Democracy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takis S. Pappas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
The United States ◽  
Comprehensive Theory ◽  
The People ◽  
Original Definition ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Great Relevance ◽  
Definition Of

Based on an original definition of modern populism as “democratic illiberalism” and many years of meticulous research, Takis Pappas marshals extraordinary empirical evidence from Argentina, Greece, Peru, Italy, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, the United States, Spain, and Brazil to develop a comprehensive theory about populism. He addresses all key issues in the debate about populism and answers significant questions of great relevance for today’s liberal democracy, including: • What is modern populism and how can it be differentiated from comparable phenomena like nativism and autocracy? • Where in Latin America has populism become most successful? Where in Europe did it emerge first? Why did its rise to power in the United States come so late? • Is Trump a populist and, if so, could he be compared best with Venezuela’s Chávez, France’s Le Pens, or Turkey’s Erdoğan? • Why has populism thrived in post-authoritarian Greece but not in Spain? And why in Argentina and not in Brazil? • Can populism ever succeed without a charismatic leader? If not, what does leadership tell us about how to challenge populism? • Who are “the people” who vote for populist parties, how are these “made” into a group, and what is in their minds? • Is there a “populist blueprint” that all populists use when in power? And what are the long-term consequences of populist rule? • What does the expansion, and possibly solidification, of populism mean for the very nature and future of contemporary democracy? Populism and Liberal Democracy will change the ways the reader understands populism and imagines the prospects of liberal democracy.

Counting on Relief: Industrializing the Statistical Interviewer during the New Deal

2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 281-310 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Didier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New Deal ◽  
White Collar ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
White Collar Workers ◽  
Statistical Studies ◽  
The One ◽  
The New Deal

ArgumentWhen the New Deal administration attained power in the United States, it was confronted with two different problems that could be linked to one another. On the one hand, there was a huge problem of unemployment, affecting everybody including the white-collar workers. And, on the other hand, the administration suffered from a very serious lack of data to illuminate its politics. One idea that came out of this situation was to use the abundant unemployed white-collar workers as enumerators of statistical studies. This paper describes this experiment, shows how it paradoxically affected the professionalization of statistics, and explains why it did not affect expert democracy despite its Deweysian participationist aspect.

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