Does Class Shape Legislators’ Approach to Inequality and Economic Policy? A Comparative View
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Do the class backgrounds of legislators shape their views and actions relating to inequality and economic policy? Building on findings about ‘white-collar government’ in the US, this article examines the relationship between legislators’ class and their attitudes and self-reported behaviour in advanced democracies, drawing on survey data from 15 countries including 73 national and subnational parliaments in Europe and Israel. I find that legislators from business backgrounds are more likely to support income inequality and small government, as well as less likely to consult with labour groups, than those from working-class and other backgrounds. These results are buttressed by analysis of an additional cross-national survey of European legislative candidates’ attitudes, which replicates key findings. Given the skewed class makeup of legislatures in advanced democracies, these findings may be relevant to our understanding of widespread economic and political inequalities that are increasingly salient in many countries.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it