Nicholas Carnes

What Good Is a College Degree? Education and Leader Quality Reconsidered

Do people with more formal education make better political leaders? In this article we analyze cross-national data on random leadership transitions, data on close elections in the US Congress, and data on randomly audited municipalities in Brazil. Across a wide range of outcomes, we consistently find that college-educated leaders perform about the same as or worse than leaders with less formal education. Politicians with college degrees do not tend to govern over more prosperous nations, do not pass more bills, do not tend to do better at the polls, and are no less likely to be corrupt. These findings have important implications for how citizens evaluate candidates, how scholars measure leader quality, and how we think about the role of education in policy making.

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

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.

Why are there so few working-class people in political office? Evidence from state legislatures

Why do so few working-class Americans go on to hold political office? This paper uses data on state legislatures to assess several common (and often untested) explanations. Contrary to the widespread view that workers are less likely to hold office because they are less qualified, I find no relationship between the qualifications of workers in a given state and their representation in the state legislature. The shortage of the working class in office appears to have far more to do with structural characteristics of the political landscape such as parties, interest groups, and institutions. Scholars who want to understand why there are so few working-class Americans in political office – and people who want to do something about it – should probably focus on these kinds of “demand-side” forces, not on the supposed “supply-side” shortcomings of the working class.

The “Mill Worker’s Son” Heuristic: How Voters Perceive Politicians from Working-Class Families—and How They Really Behave in Office

Politicians often highlight how hard their families had it when they were growing up, presumably in the hopes that voters will see them as more supportive of policies that benefit middle- and working-class Americans. What do voters actually infer from how candidates were raised? And what should they infer? We use a set of candidate evaluation experiments (and an external validity test drawing on actual congressional election returns) to study how Americans perceive politicians raised in more and less affluent families. We then compare these perceptions to data on how lawmakers brought up in different classes actually behave in office. Although voters often infer that politicians from less privileged families are more economically progressive, these lawmakers don’t actually stand out on standard measures of legislative voting. The “mill worker’s son” heuristic appears to be a misleading shortcut, a cue that leads voters to make faulty inferences about candidates’ political priorities.

Does the descriptive representation of the working class “crowd out” women and minorities (and vice versa)? Evidence from the Local Elections in America Project

If working-class Americans begin holding political office in larger numbers, could they eventually “crowd out” other historically underrepresented groups such as women and minorities? This paper develops a simple theory to predict when the descriptive representation of one social group will decrease the descriptive representation of others. I then use the Local Elections in America Projects data to explore the links between the racial, gender, and social class makeup of candidates and officeholders in more than 18,000 local and county elections in California. The descriptive representation of workers does not seem to reduce female or minority representation. To the contrary, many working-class candidates are women and minorities, and those who are not do not seem to pose any threat of crowding out other historically underrepresented groups.

Does Paying Politicians More Promote Economic Diversity in Legislatures

If politicians in the United States were paid better, would more middle- and working-class people become politicians? Reformers often argue that the low salaries paid in state and local governments make holding office economically infeasible for lower-income citizens and contribute to the enduring numerical under-representation of the working class in our political institutions. Of course, raising politicians’ salaries could also make political office more attractive to affluent professionals, increasing competition for office and ultimately discouraging lower-income citizens from running and winning. In this article, we test these hypotheses using data on the salaries and economic backgrounds of state legislators. Contrary to the notion that paying politicians more promotes economic diversity, we find that the descriptive representation of the working class is the same or worse in states that pay legislators higher salaries. These findings have important implications for research on descriptive representation, political compensation, and political inequality.

Why Do Members of Congress Support Agricultural Protection

It seems paradoxical that until recently, developed countries have continued subsidizing agriculture even though their agricultural sectors had been declining in relative importance since the middle of the 20th century. What drives support for agricultural protection—the broad array of subsidies to farmers and taxes and quotas imposed on agricultural imports—in developed countries? We answer this question by testing three competing hypotheses about what drives support for agricultural protection in the US: (i) legislator preferences, (ii) electoral incentives, or (iii) lobbying. Using data on the roll call votes of the members of the 106th through the 110th Congresses (1999-2009) and the scores given to each legislator by the Farm Bureau, our findings suggest electoral incentives explain a great deal of the variation in support for agricultural protection, but that legislator preferences and lobbying might play a role, too. Moreover, legislator preferences and electoral incentives appear to be substitutes for one another. Why does Congress support agricultural protection? Because many members have electoral incentives to—and because many of those who do not still have other personal or strategic interests at stake.

Replication Data for: What Happens When Insurers Make the Insurance Laws? State Legislative Agendas and the Occupational Makeup of Government

Do the occupational backgrounds of politicians affect the government’s agenda? Businesses have long thought so. The first occupational data on state legislators were collected by the Insurance Information Institute, an interest group representing major insurance companies. In this paper, we test one potential motive for these kinds of efforts: the idea that the occupational makeup of governments affects the agendas they pursue, an argument that has been largely neglected in research on politicians’ occupational backgrounds. We focus here on the insurance industry. Using original data, we find that state legislatures with more former insurers consider fewer bills regulating insurance (negative agenda control), that former insurers play a disproportionate role in drafting the insurance bills that are introduced (positive agenda control), and that the bills former insurers introduce tend to be more favorable to the industry than those that their colleagues introduce (positive agenda control). The occupational makeup of legislatures may indeed affect their agendas, as industry groups have long suspected.