Nicholas W. Carnes

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · August 2023 In early 2021, members of Congress cast a series of high-profile roll call votes forcing them to choose between condoning or opposing Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Substantial majorities of House Republicans supported T ... Full text Cite

The Economic Backgrounds of Politicians

Book · June 15, 2023 Research on the economic backgrounds of politicians is once again flourishing in political science. In this article, we describe the economic characteristics that scholars have recently studied and the common threads that have emerged in modern work on thi ... Full text Cite

Why Local Party Leaders Don't Support Nominating Centrists

Journal Article British Journal of Political Science · April 1, 2021 Would giving party leaders more influence in primary elections in the United States decrease elite polarization? Some scholars have argued that political party leaders tend to support centrist candidates in the hopes of winning general elections. In contra ... Full text Cite

The white working class and the 2016 election

Journal Article Perspectives on Politics · March 1, 2021 Academics and political pundits alike attribute rising support for right-wing political options across advanced democracies to the working classes. In the United States, authors claim that the white working class offered unprecedented and crucial support f ... Full text Cite

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

Journal Article State Politics and Policy Quarterly · June 1, 2019 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 ins ... Full text Cite

Do public officials exhibit social class biases when they handle casework? Evidence from multiple correspondence experiments.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2019 Are public officials more responsive to requests from affluent or poor constituents? A growing body of evidence suggests that lawmakers are more responsive to the rich when they craft policy. However, some scholars theorize that officials also exhibit a co ... Full text Cite

THE CASH CEILING: WHY ONLY THE RICH RUN FOR OFFICE- AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT

Book · January 1, 2018 Why are Americans governed by the rich? Millionaires make up only three percent of the public but control all three branches of the federal government. How did this happen? What stops lower-income and working-class Americans from becoming politicians? The ... Cite

Adam Smith would be spinning in His Grave: Government by the rich in the United States

Journal Article Forum (Germany) · April 1, 2017 Politicians in the US tend to be vastly better off than the people they represent. But why, and does it matter? In the last decade, scholar of US politics have revived an old line of inquiry into the causes and consequences of government by the privileged, ... Full text Cite

Do voters dislike working-class candidates? Voter biases and the descriptive underrepresentation of the working class

Journal Article American Political Science Review · November 1, 2016 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 ex ... Full text Cite

Does paying politicians more promote economic diversity in legislatures?

Journal Article American Political Science Review · November 1, 2016 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-inco ... Full text Cite

Who votes for inequality?

Chapter · February 15, 2016 Full text Cite

What good is a college degree? Education and leader quality reconsidered

Conference Journal of Politics · January 1, 2016 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 ... Full text Cite

White-collar government in the United States

Journal Article Swiss Political Science Review · June 1, 2015 Full text Cite

Rethinking the comparative perspective on class and representation: Evidence from latin america

Journal Article American Journal of Political Science · January 1, 2015 Does it matter that working-class citizens are numerically underrepresented in political offices throughout the world? For decades, the conventional wisdom in comparative politics has been that it does not, that lawmakers from different classes think and b ... Full text Cite

Why do members of congress support agricultural protection?

Journal Article Food Policy · January 1, 2015 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 ... Full text Cite

The "mill worker's son" heuristic: How voters perceive politicians from working-class families-And how they really behave in office

Journal Article Journal of Politics · January 1, 2015 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 c ... Full text Cite

Rethinking the comparative perspective on class and representation: Evidence from Latin America

Journal Article Working Paper of the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies · November 11, 2013 Does it matter that working-class citizens are numerically underrepresented in political offices throughout the world? For decades, the conventional wisdom in comparative politics has been that it does not, that lawmakers from different classes think and b ... Cite

Holding Mayors Accountable: New York's Executives from Koch to Bloomberg

Journal Article American Journal of Political Science · October 2012 How do citizens evaluate the performance of their mayors? Previous studies have examined mayoral performance either with cross-sectional surveys or by comparing pairs of consecutive elections. In this paper, we use 150 surveys conducted in New York City be ... Cite

Does the Numerical Underrepresentation of the Working Class in Congress Matter?

Journal Article Legislative Studies Quarterly · January 2012 Working-class citizens have been numerically underrepresented in policymaking institutions throughout most of America‟s history. Little is known, however, about the political consequences of this enduring feature of our democratic system. This essay examin ... Link to item Cite