Should Workers Represent Workers

The evidence now seems clear that, once you look beyond roll call votes, Black legislators do a better job than Whites of representing Black constituents, women legislators do a better job than men of representing female constituents, and legislators from working-class backgrounds do a better job than others of representing working-class constituents.1 If there were no costs to increasing the representation of these constituents by legislators with the same personal background characteristics ("descriptive" representation), we should redesign our institutions to do so. But there are some costs. One broad cost derives from focusing citizens' attention on their own and legislators' background characteristics rather than the capacity and desire of those legislators to promote effective public policies. A narrower and less important cost arises when the funds required for increasing descriptive representation must be taken from some other worthy expenditure. I argue here that we should be more willing to pay the relevant costs when particular historical contexts make descriptive representation more democratically valuable. In my overall analysis, there are two primary criteria for whether any groups ought to be specifically represented, descriptively or otherwise. The first criterion for specific representation is that the members of these groups have conflicting interests. When interests conflict, the production of legitimate democratic coercion (Mansbridge 2014) requires that those interests be represented in approximate proportion to the number of interest-bearers. When the interests conflict but also cross-cut, majority rule in an assembly will often work out over time to produce a relatively fair and therefore relatively legitimate distribution of wins and losses across the population. Where interests conflict and are segmented, however, legitimate coercion may also require something approaching proportional outcomes.2 The second criterion for specific representation is that the members of the groups with a claim to be represented have different perspectives on common issues. In this case, the epistemic (or knowledge-generating) purposes of democracy are best served by at least a "threshold" presence (Kymlicka 1995) of representatives of the relevant groups in the decision-making body. Regarding descriptive representation, recent research has revealed that in the United States fairly subtle aspects of representatives' personal lives – such as whether they smoke cigarettes, have children in public school, or have female children – affect not only their more costly pre-voting activities but sometimes even their roll-call votes on legislation (Burden 2007; Washington 2008). For most such personal aspects of a representative's life, random variation produces proportional descriptive representation in the legislature. When such variation does not appear, we should ask what kind of bias might have intervened. If a particular group has once been excluded by law from the vote but is now included on the grounds that the former exclusion was unjust (as the working class was earlier excluded through property qualifications for voting), it is appropriate to ask whether a continuing unjust bias might affect the current process of selection for office. Beyond these overall criteria for representation in general, in an earlier work I also argued that in four distinct contexts – contexts of uncrystallized interests, a history of communicative mistrust, a social understanding of the group as "unfit to rule," or diminished legitimacy of governmental decisions – descriptive representation becomes particularly important to the democratic process. When these historical conditions arise, we should be willing to incur more costs to our other values in order to achieve descriptive representation (Mansbridge 1999). None of the four contextual considerations that I identified in my earlier work applies as clearly to the descriptive representation of the working class as it does to Blacks or women, at least in the United States. However, a different contextual consideration does affect the importance of having legislators from working-class (or "blue collar") backgrounds represent working-class citizens. This factor is how well working-class citizens are represented in other ways in the larger representative system. When unions and parties representing the working class become less able to represent working-class interests, descriptive representation becomes correspondingly more important. This fifth factor – how well a group's interests are represented in the larger system through other mechanisms – may well be the most important overall factor in judging the relative importance of descriptive representation, not only for the working class but also for Blacks, women, and all groups that ought to have proportional representation of their interests in a legislature. The next sections will discuss these five contextual considerations. Descriptive representation is particularly crucial in the context of "uncrystallized interests," where political parties have not formulated stances on an issue that might affect a group's interests, the issue has not been debated in the media, and neither citizens nor their representatives have well-articulated positions for and against particular policies on the issue. For women in the U.S., an excellent example comes from the 1991 hearings on Clarence Thomas's proposed appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. These hearings occurred significantly after the start of what is usually called the "second wave" of the feminist movement in the late 1960s but before the issue of sexual harassment had become a political issue nationally or internationally. At this historical moment, when no one had run for office on a platform that even mentioned sexual harassment, and probably no one had even mentioned the problem in a political speech, it was a group of women representatives from the U.S. House of Representatives who charged up the steps of the Senate to demand that the committee considering Thomas's appointment take seriously the charges advanced by his former subordinate, Anita Hill. Sexual harassment was at the time a politically "uncrystallized" issue. The women representatives who ran up the Senate steps together had not run for office on this issue. Their parties had not taken stands on it. Yet because of their experiences as women, they recognized its importance and acted on that recognition. Had there been no women in the House of Representatives, women citizens who opposed sexual harassment would have had no active representation on the issue. In cases of uncrystallized interests, descriptive representation does not contrast with substantive representation; it is a particular mechanism for substantive representation. Class issues have traditionally been far more politically crystallized than gender issues were in 1991. Political battles have been fought over class issues since before Aristotle. In all advanced democracies one or more political parties is now, or at least has been, particularly identified with labor or the working class. Political party platforms have taken stances on issues such as the minimum wage, job security, and employment. Long-standing organizations such as unions have formulated policies to help the working class, have invested their membership's money and capacities in bringing those policies before the public, and have elected legislators who would back them. With the caveats that crystallization means articulation, formulation, and development, not petrification, and that issues are always changing in substance and valence, class may have produced the most crystallized set of interests in political history, with national identity a close second. For this reason, individuals who are not descriptively representative of the working class can relatively easily develop a good understanding of most working-class interests, become deeply committed to them, and act as excellent representatives of such constituents' substantive interests. Despite the high level of crystallization of these issues, however, representatives who have themselves lived through typically working-class experiences will be more likely than others to understand the nuances of these issues and thus be able to represent their working-class constituents more insightfully than even committed and well-meaning representatives who have not had similar experiences. Because key aspects of any legislation are always uncrystallized, the parliaments that debate and decide on that legislature should include representatives who can, as John Stuart Mill ([1861] 1991) put it, look at a question "with the eyes of a working man." The deliberative forum should include at least threshold descriptive representation by individuals who can draw from their own experience to recognize aspects of the issues that others would not see and communicate their insights to others through stories and self-example as well as through purely cognitive arguments. The case for descriptive representation in contexts of uncrystallized interests is, however, stronger for gender, and to a lesser degree even race, than for class. Descriptive representation is also particularly important in contexts of communicative distrust. In the U.S., distrust of Whites has been and remains fairly high in the Black community. Black constituents accordingly feel more at ease contacting a Black representative than a White one. The communicative gap is not so great between women and men, at least in the U.S., because women have usually grown up in families with men, gone to school with men, married men, and worked closely with men on the job and raising children. Nor does the communicative gap seem as great between the working class and the middle or professional class as between Blacks and Whites in the U.S. If this is so, the argument for descriptive representation by class on the grounds of communicative distrust is correspondingly weaker. In any country, representatives who have personal backgrounds from the working class may be more able than others to communicate with their working-class constituents by drawing from their own experiences and signaling in other ways their openness to two-way discussion of the issues. Even in the U.S., a regional accent and personal habits may signal a background that is, if not working class itself, at least born of long-standing interaction with working class people. In more hierarchical cultures, such as Great Britain, where a listener can identify a speaker's class after the speaker's first few words, the communicative gap across class may have greater salience. In the traditional Labour Party in Britain, some representatives from union backgrounds continued to wear the clothes and cap and keep the accent of the working class in order to maintain both the trust of their constituents and their communicative connections. The more salient class or regional differences are, the more important it is for descriptive representatives to display the outward signs of being themselves members of the descriptive group, particularly when that group is marginalized in the larger polity. Similarly, the more mutable these differences are – that is, the easier it is for someone born into one class or region to become a member of and take on the interests of another class or region – the more important it may be to display the outward signs of common membership in a more marginalized group. As with cases of uncrystallized interests, in cases of communicative distrust descriptive representation does not contrast with substantive representation; it is a particular mechanism for substantive representation. To the degree that class differences impede communication between representatives and constituents, descriptive representation by class promotes democratic ends. In some historical contexts, the absence of descriptive representation in the legislative halls of the republic is a public mark of inability to rule. The society at large has made an implicit social judgment that a group is not, in the German phrase, regierungsfähig. When this is the case, descriptive representation breaks that mindset and begins to undermine the norm. In India, mandating that that one-third of the seats in randomly selected village councils be reserved for women seems to have caused a sea-change in the political meaning of gender. After experiencing women leaders in villages selected for mandated descriptive representation, the males in those villages no longer said on surveys that they considered male leaders more effective than female leaders. In addition, after the mandate was dropped, women continued to be elected to office. In the villages that had two mandated cycles of descriptive representation by gender, adolescent girls increased their career aspirations dramatically and began to get as much schooling as boys (Pande et al. 2009, 2012). Instituting greater descriptive representation by class may not have as strong an effect on the dimension of social meaning. At least in the United States, individuals with a working class background are not usually stigmatized as incapable of ruling. On the contrary, despite the fact that a majority of the members of the U.S. Congress are now millionaires, candidates running for office tend to emphasize their humble origins, even stretching the truth on occasion to suggest a working class background. Because class is mutable, unlike some other features of citizens that may be descriptively represented in a legislature, the social meaning of greater representation of the working class in the legislature may also be less clear than with race or gender. In the classic contrast between "ascribed" and "achieved" status (Linton 1936), one's class as a child is fixed socially in ways that are beyond one's control ("ascribed") in ways that parallel race or gender, but one's class as an adult is not. In most countries, the job of a legislator has most of the characteristics of a middle-class or professional job, including non-manual labor and a relatively high salary, so the individuals who become legislators are by definition and in practice no longer working class. Many legislators with working-class parents have themselves achieved middle-class or professional status even before they are recruited to run for the legislature. As a result of this relative fluidity, the disproportionally small percentage of legislators who have working-class origins or had working-class occupations before their entry into the legislature does not translate, at least in the U.S., into a strong social conclusion that individuals with a working-class background are not fully qualified to run the country. Some democracies are so divided that significant descriptive underrepresentation of certain groups in the national legislature undermines the legitimacy of the regime in the eyes of those less well represented. For this reason, in Switzerland and Belgium the governmental system has been explicitly designed to represent linguistic groups more or less proportionately. In the U.S., continuing underrepresentation by race has arguably undercut the perceived legitimacy of government among Black citizens. The same dynamic does not seem to hold for gender, in part because many citizens define most of their interests by what is good for their household and most households include both males and females. The descriptive underrepresentation of working-class citizens also may not have this delegitimizing effect, partly because class is somewhat fluid. Although empirical evidence on this question is sparse, the relative silence of working-class constituents themselves on the paucity of working-class representatives in the legislatures may indicate that this underrepresentation does not play a large role in undermining the perceived legitimacy of legislatures, even when that overall legitimacy is low, as it now is in the U.S. In short, the four contexts of uncrystallized interests, a history of communicative mistrust, a social understanding of the group as "unfit to rule," and diminished legitimacy of governmental decisions are important in general but less crucial for the representation of working class interests than for the interests of Blacks and women, at least in the United States. The most important contextual question to ask in determining the relative importance of descriptive representation may be simply how well the larger representative system represents a group's interests through mechanisms other than descriptive representation. The last half century in both the U.S. and Europe has seen a decline in the strength of both labor unions and the political parties that organize and represent working class interests. Legislators from majority working-class constituencies and political parties on the left continue to promote working-class interests, but the number of districts where workers have enough political strength to elect a representative deeply committed to their interests and the number of parties primarily committed to those interests are declining. The less the working class is represented by political structures designed explicitly to further working-class interests, the more it needs other forms of representation. In descriptive representation, the question of legislators' motivation is central. In a "sanction model" of legislators' motivations, external sanctions produce the representative's behavior. In a contrasting "selection model," internal ("gyroscopic") motivation determines representatives' behavior and voter power works through selecting such representatives and placing them in the legislature, thus affecting the legislature's direction. Because no actual representative is motivated solely by internal commitments or external sanctions, all real cases involve a "selection core" and a "sanction periphery" of varying weights (Mansbridge 2003, 2009, 2011). Arguments for the descriptive representation of substantive interests assume a model in which descriptive representatives have some internal motivation, conscious or unconscious, to pursue the interests of their descriptive group. This motivation affects bill sponsorship and committee membership as well as other actions not easily captured by quantifiable measures. In the case of the working class, the individual representatives who have at some point lived working-class lives should be in some way (even if only unconsciously) internally committed to furthering working-class interests if their backgrounds are to fill the functions of descriptive representation by class. When this motivation is not active (Dovi 2007), the case for descriptive representation is weakened. Descriptive representation comes in two forms, each with different costs. In "microcosmic" representation, promoted by some eighteenth century democratic theorists, the legislature should exactly mirror the citizenry (Pitkin [1967] 1972; Manin [1995] 1997). In 1970, Robert Dahl suggested instituting a third legislative chamber, selected randomly from among the citizenry, to advise the elected legislature (Dahl 1970, 149; see also Dahl 1977, 17; Dahl 1985, 86-89; Dahl 1992, 54-57; Barber 1984, 290-93; Leib 2004). Such a microcosmic randomly-selected assembly could model deliberation on important issues for the rest of the citizenry, develop citizen expertise on a few significant issues such as climate change and nuclear warfare, and suggest the results potentially achievable if money were less significant in politics. Many democracies have already experimented with representation by lot in randomly selected mini-publics such as small citizens' juries and larger citizens' assemblies and Deliberative Polls. Far more experimentation would be required, however, to identify potential costs of these mechanisms and accustom people to the workings of the lot before most citizens would consider such an advisory third assembly a plausible addition to current institutions of representation. If a microcosmic assembly selected by lot were not advisory but had binding legislative power, this particular form of descriptive representation would probably generate costs in the legislators having less ability, expertise, and possibly even commitment to the common good than legislators chosen through election – although New England town meetings are governed directly by their citizens without noticeable losses in good policy or efficiency (Mansbridge 1980, Bryan 2004). The mechanism of selection by lot would also have other costs: diminished accountability to the voters through eliminating the threat of not being re-elected and diminished consent of the sort that some voters feel they give through participating in an election. No political actor has, to my knowledge, ever proposed selection by lot either as a binding form of representation or as the only form of representation on a national or state level in any polity, so these considerations are purely speculative and future-oriented. "Selective representation" is the more common form of consciously-achieved descriptive representation. Selective representation uses electoral and other forms of institutional design to increase the representation of selected groups. Electoral design, for example, might involve moving from "first-past-the-post" single member districts to various forms of proportional representation or redrawing district boundaries. Other institutional designs might involve mandating parties to place certain numbers of representatives from each group on their party lists. All of these mechanisms can change the percentage of legislators from each region, religion, language, ethnic group, caste, or gender, and each has its well-known costs and benefits.3 A broader cost of selective representation may be that of encouraging citizens to see themselves primarily in terms of selected parts of their identities.4 Normatively, the analysis above suggests that only two characteristics entitle groups to proportional representation in a legislature – conflicting interests with other groups and useful perspectives on the common good (see also Mansbridge 1981, 2003). In addition, when the law in a particular nation has at some historical point specifically disbarred members of a group from voting, the case for expecting continuing bias against that group is strengthened, as is the normative case for affirmative action to promote descriptive representation for that group (Williams 1998). The five contextual reasons suggested in this paper are also relevant. Without this contextual analysis, however, any proposal to select some characteristics for conscious representation has the potential for encouraging a kind of essentialism in identities (Mansbridge 1999) that may then spread beyond the groups that can, for example, historical by being the of them from the As specific identity becomes the the identity of citizen may be As descriptive representation will by some form of selection is If the reasons for selection were to the to the of representation, then actions designed to increase descriptive representation from those groups could incur the cost of the overall capacity of the legislature. Legislators from working class for example, may well be in legislatures in large part because working-class do not develop the of and policy analysis that legislative people of working-class who have in school that are useful in are likely to have themselves into status occupations before they run for office. which is a to into a legislative career in the United States, this If these of selection for and were any democracy would incur significant costs them. No one however, either that the of in the are such as to select the best in the nation for the legislature or that the characteristics that make a good including well with constituents, are to the current middle and the the and in the No such external is to help the action of the working class. in and could the required to increase working-class representation, but the required although relatively might have to at the of other worthy The considerations that make descriptive representation democratically important for Blacks and women – uncrystallized interests, a history of communicative a social of the group caused in part by absence from the halls of power, or regime legitimacy – are not as for the working class. But the fact that members of the working class achieve a proportional representation of their interests and perspectives in the system a and strong argument for their descriptive representation. When working class interests are not represented in the representative both and deliberative democratic mandate affirmative attention to descriptive representation. The (or democratic is that in of conflicting each group interests conflict with those of others have votes proportional to their percentage in the population. The deliberative is that each group with a useful on a common problem have to the of its perspectives in all appropriate and other a demand that in the of the many in most legislatures requires in representation (Mansbridge 1999). for in descriptive representation from the most to the most Because needs for descriptive representation are contextual and contexts may change the institutions for descriptive in representation are best fluid. To current class in representation, for example, political parties could to class when candidates for office. and other institutions such as and could to working-class citizens in and them to run for office. a to in the U.S., could have for from working-class backgrounds with an in political office. political could be If the descriptive representation of the working class is to some conscious process of public political and selection for must current which are designed in ways that a paucity of such Mansbridge is of Political and at is the of Beyond an empirical and normative of and the a of in social on for an to the U.S. is also or of the Beyond Deliberative and in current work of representation, democratic and the public understanding of action

Demographic economics · Economics · Political science · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Gender Politics and Representation · Social Policy and Reform Studies

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