What’s Stopping Them?
This chapter aims to shed light on the gates that keep workers out of office in the United States. Elections themselves appear to be the root cause. The analysis focuses on the two features of elections that seem to be behind the micro-level inequalities documented in Chapter 3, namely, the high and rising burdens associated with campaigning and the insular world of candidate recruitment. The practical anxieties that keep individual workers from running appear to stem from the very nature of elections in a representative democracy. The encouragement gaps that workers experience seem to arise from the basic logic of the candidate recruitment process, the fundamental challenges that lead many recruiters to simply look for new recruits within their own mostly white-collar personal networks.