“Modern life in every country would truly be unthinkable without the people who pave roads, repair electrical lines, move freight, style hair, work in factories, deliver packages, stock shelves, build houses, repair cars, clean hotel rooms, answer phones, dig trenches, wait tables, clean hospitals, ring up groceries, fill in potholes, and empty garbage. Although people in working-class jobs make up large majorities of most labor forces, they almost never go on to hold elected office in the political institutions that make the most consequential decisions about economic and social life.”
The above is a quote from professors Nick Carnes and Noam Lupu in their new book, Keeping Workers Off the Ballot: How Democracy Undermines Working-Class Representation. For me, it was one of the most important episodes I’ve done, as Nick and Noam were able to explain with great clarity the fundamentally elitist nature of American democracy, and why we should feel a moral imperative to get more workers in office in this country.
Our interview covered:
How bad is working class underrepresentation in the US and how it compares to other countries
Why having workers in office is important for any democracy
Why running for office is so hard and why economic precarity stops workers from even trying
Why standard solutions— campaign finance reform and raising legislator salaries— won’t be enough, and what actually might work
You can watch the full episode in the embedded player above or anywhere you get your podcasts. And If you have a minute, ratings on Spotify and Apple Podcasts make a real difference in helping new listeners find the show.
It’s also featured on the website, with the full archive: www.thecivicforum.com
A lightly edited transcript is included below. I’ve highlighted some of the passages that I thought were most useful. Thanks to Cindy and Richard Wasserman for sponsoring the episode.
A quick logistical note— I’ve had to cancel the live session scheduled for this Thursday because of some personal obligations. We’ll continue the live sessions after the 4th of July with Jess Craven and Micah L. Sifry. That session is on July 9th, 1PM ET and is titled “What Do I Do At a Time Like This?” Micah and Jess are deep in the grassroots organizing space and will inject a little hope, humor and agency into our conversations. Link is here: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/220990
That’s all for today, thanks for supporting this work.
Best,
Rory
Getting Workers on the Ballot
Rory Truex: Can you tell us how bad is the problem of working class underrepresentation in the democratic world? What do the numbers look like?
Nick Carnes: If you were to look here in the US at our Congress, about a little over half of our labor force comes from what we call working class jobs. So these are manual labor jobs like construction workers, service industry jobs like restaurant servers, clerical jobs like receptionists, informal sector jobs like day laborers. If you add up all those jobs in our economy here in the US, it’s a little over half of the labor force.
If you were to take the Congress we have right now and ask how many people had that kind of job and they got into politics and they went on to become a member of Congress who’s serving right now, the number would be about 1% currently. So it’s really, really unlikely that a person in the US who has a working class job is going to get into politics and go on to become a member of Congress. Almost no one in our Congress today does that.
And the US is not alone in this respect. We actually look a lot like the average global democracy. For this book, Noam and I partnered with some collaborators to collect data on all the electoral democracies in the world to try to get a snapshot of: does this happen in every country? And the answer is yes. We looked at 97 democracies. In the average democracy, the labor force is about 70% working class. So in the US it’s only about 50%; in the average democracy, it’s about 70%. But like the US, in a typical democracy, only about 2% of the national legislature comes from working class jobs. The gap is just enormous between working class people and the people who represent them and make the choices that affect their lives.
Rory Truex: Is this a modern phenomenon or has this been going on for decades?
Nick Carnes: Here in the US, the phenomenon is actually remarkably constant. It’s one of these rare historical constants. Any data set you find on the US from any time period, you’re going to see a pattern similar to what we have today. If you look at data on the US Congress going back to Congress number one, the first Congress of the founding of the country all the way to the present day, people from working class jobs never make up more than 2% of Congress.
It’s tempting to tell a story here in the US about how things were better in the past — before Citizens United, before the decline of labor unions, before party polarization. But on this important measure of the health of democracy, there are no good old days. There’s no past where working class people held office in large numbers. The story is more like: you can’t fall off the floor. We’re as close to zero as we can feasibly be throughout all of US history.
We see different patterns in Europe. Maybe I should pass it to Noam to talk about what we sometimes see in other democracies.
Noam Lupu: There are cases where more working class people have made it into office at other historical moments. There are some democracies that elect more working class people into office. It’s never anywhere close to what the electorate looks like, so it’s always skewed towards more affluent people. But there is some variation there, and then there’s a lot of variation over time.
If you go back to the early Labor Party in the UK, you do get a moment at the beginning of the 20th century when a whole bunch of working class people were elected into the House of Commons. It’s also a moment where there were many more working class people in the UK. So some amount of gap is always there, but there is a little bit of variation over time. In general, the historical trend has been declining working class representation in these national legislatures. The places where we have seen more working class people enter public office have mostly come back to the average — the floor that Nick mentioned.
Why Working Class Representation Matters
Rory Truex: One of the arguments you make in the book is that there’s a moral reason to try to improve working class representation. Can you tell us why working class representation matters? Do working class legislators talk differently? Do they behave differently? Do they push for different policy proposals? You mention an elitist argument that’s often made — that working class people can’t represent themselves, that they need somebody white-collar, more educated to represent their interests for them. You’re very deliberate in the book that you argue against that. So why should we be prioritizing working class representation?
Noam Lupu: Just to add to your question — there is the elitist argument that elites, or more affluent people, or let’s say lawyers, are better equipped to be legislators and representatives than working class people.
In general, around the world, working class people tend to hold positions on economic and social policy that are more progressive or more towards the left. They’re generally more supportive of raising minimum wages, more supportive of redistributive policies, unemployment insurance, more supportive of unionizing and labor rights. And you see that also in politicians. If you look at surveys of politicians, when they come from working class backgrounds, they also tend to hold those same preferences. We have also seen that affects the kinds of policies that they put forward — they are more likely to set an agenda that moves policy in this direction.
There’s lots of other work in political science and even in economics that has looked at this question as well and has found all sorts of effects on policy outcomes. Particularly when working class people get into executive office — like mayors and things like that — they tend to spend more on redistribution, spend more on economic issues, maybe spend less or emphasize less business interests and those kinds of things.
There are lots of policy implications of having working class people in office. And then there’s the symbolic effect. People talk about this with other characteristics of politicians, like their gender or their ethnicity. We’re talking about at least a majority of people in just about every democracy — and often supermajorities — being able to see themselves in the representative bodies that run our countries. There is also some research on those kinds of symbolic effects, and those are also important.
Nick Carnes: Occasionally we hear this objection that says: does it matter where a politician’s from? Couldn’t a politician who’s from a very privileged background — white collar job, rich — couldn’t they do a great job representing working class people anyway, in spite of the fact that they don’t come from the working class? The answer is, yes, in principle they absolutely can, and you can probably think of examples of politicians in lots of countries who fit that description. But in practice, it just doesn’t happen that often.
If it were really like that, then we would not be able to run studies where we compare politicians from different occupational backgrounds and see what we see — which is that they really do think differently and behave differently and enact different kinds of policies. There might be exceptions out there, but they kind of prove the rule.
What Noam was describing lines up really nicely with what politicians themselves tell us when they’re running for office. If a politician mentions their occupation, uses it in their campaign material, it’s usually something like, “I was a business owner, so I understand what businesses need. I was a school teacher, so I understand what the school system needs. I was a nurse or a midwife, I understand what the healthcare system needs.” Our argument is basically: they’re telling the truth. They really do bring different perspectives. They understand problems differently. They have different kinds of relationships to the issues.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. We want people to bring their expertise. If we want a really nimble government in a fast-changing economy, we want a lot of different perspectives at the table when we make decisions that affect everybody. The problem becomes when you keep an entire class — or classes — of people, when they don’t have a seat at the table. Then their needs are just not being represented as well. And that, Rory, goes back to where you started, which is that this creates a kind of ethical imperative to try to figure out what the problem is, what exactly keeps working class people out, and how do we fix that.
Career Politicians and the Pipeline
Rory Truex: Do you think part of it is people making space for working class people to run? I work at a fancy institution. You two work at Vanderbilt and Duke respectively — three fancy institutions. I have students, God bless them, who have been running for senator since they were 16 years old. They have a lot of talent. They’re ambitious. I think their hearts are in a good place, but they’ve also behaved in that way since they were very young. It’s a very manicured personality type, very careful.
There’s an interesting debate right now. Graham Platner just won his primary election — I don’t really want to litigate all of that baggage. But there is this debate that I’m seeing on social media about how we don’t want politicians that are perfect, because we aren’t perfect, and it’s okay for someone to have made mistakes and apologized for them.
So I’m thinking about this elitist class of politician — and there are dozens of them. Is it a matter of discouraging those folks from running and getting people in the mindset of uplifting others rather than trying to seize the mic themselves? More of a rant than a question, but do you see an issue there? Nick, why don’t we start with you.
Nick Carnes: Our political institutions are pretty big. There’s room for people like the student you described. There’s room for them in our political institutions. I think our argument is we need to make a little space.
What I think the ideal political institution would be is a microcosm of the country it’s supposed to represent. It would literally recreate the landscape of the labor force, and for that matter represent our country’s racial, gender, age diversity as well. But this is just to say I don’t think your student who’s been preparing their entire life to be a senator should be kicked out of the process.
Let’s say that student becomes a senator. What I would say to them is: “As you’re winding down your career, as you’re looking to retire from the Senate, can you bring up staff members who have working class jobs, come from working class backgrounds? Can you try to bring the person in behind you? Can you help train candidates in your party who come from working class jobs?”
At the end of the day, there are a fixed number of seats in any political institution, but there are a lot of them. There are enough that the institution can be representative. And even though there’s no substitute for people from working class jobs going into office, it doesn’t mean that our students who don’t come from the working class can’t be a part of the solution. I would encourage that student to keep following their dreams, but also build some connections now to working class people, that they can then be an agent of change once they’re in office.
Rory Truex: That was a wonderfully diplomatic answer, Nick. Noam, did you want to get into this one or you want to move to the next question?
Noam Lupu: I completely agree with what Nick said. I would just add that the thing you’re describing — this rise of career politicians, politics as a career — is fairly recent. Something like the last forty, fifty years. And the phenomenon that we’re describing actually predates that. So I just want to point out that the rise of career politics is not the cause of the thing we’re talking about, though it is something that’s happening in all of these democracies. And as Nick said, it’s not something that we think we have to foreclose. We just think there has to be some room for other kinds of people to get into politics.
Why Workers Don’t Run
Rory Truex: Tell us about the structural barriers — what makes running for office so hard, especially for working class people?
Noam Lupu: Our argument is that in order to get into office in any electoral democracy, what we force our candidates to do is run in elections. And running in elections is hard. It’s harder in some places than in others, and there’s a lot of variation around the world. It’s especially hard in the US. There are all sorts of things that make it particularly burdensome in the US, but it’s always a burden.
You have to take time away from other things people care about — taking time away from your family, taking time away from maybe earning an income, taking time away from just having some time to yourself if you spend most of your time working. And it requires that you maybe spend some resources or forego the possibility of making money with that time that you’re giving.
It’s not entirely just time running for office in a campaign. In order to get there, you also have to often get involved in a political party, attend meetings in the evenings, do some work for that party in order to eventually become a candidate. So there’s a lot of personal burden that you have to take on.
It’s risky. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You don’t know what’s going to happen in a campaign — if somebody’s going to say something about you that’s going to take up all of your energy and take up all of your family’s energy for the next couple of weeks. You don’t know the outcome of the election, obviously. All of those things are burdens that everybody has to take on.
It’s not a higher burden for a candidate coming from the working class than a candidate who’s a lawyer at a law firm. The difference is that working class people are already in a precarious situation. They don’t necessarily have savings that they can put towards running for office. They don’t necessarily have the time to take away from work. They can’t go on leave in order to run for office the way that, in fact, the three of us could — get a leave but have our job waiting for us when we come back. And if we don’t win, that job is just waiting for us. So all of those personal burdens become that much more difficult for a working class person to run for office than for somebody who’s not working class.
Rory Truex: Can you make this come alive a bit more with some examples?
Nick Carnes: I can think of a recent example from my own life, which isn’t part of the research for the book. A friend of mine ran for school board recently, and we were talking about it during the height of the campaign, a week or two before the election. This friend had worked in tech previously and would probably describe themselves as having a fair amount of stability in their life. They just described how impossibly difficult it was to run for school board.
School board isn’t the US Senate. School board isn’t even the mayor. It’s one of the more local races people think about here in the US. And this friend was just describing how incredibly burdensome and time-consuming it was, and even said — knowing kind of what I do — “I could not have done this if I hadn’t had the professional background that I have. I could not have done this if I had a completely different occupational trajectory where I’m a working class person, I don’t have a lot of money saved up.”
And that’s important to remember when we think about politicians: whatever you think of your elected officials where you are, they sacrificed tremendously to run for office, to serve their communities. You may not like their politics or their ideology or their policy proposals, but almost to a one, they sacrifice tremendously. And they will tell you when you talk to them: “Yes, running for office is extremely burdensome.” Even in a school board race — and I’m not trying to diminish school boards at all, but even in the races that are most geographically local, people will tell you: “This was really hard. I sacrificed, I suffered, I lost sleep.”
When you then say, “Okay, well, now imagine you’re a working class person,” then it becomes that much more impossible to imagine doing it.
Noam Lupu: That’s a great example. To use a current example: we mention in the book Dan Osborn running for the Senate in Nebraska, and he’s running again. He talked about this in the campaign and talked about it after he lost two years ago. The fact that he’s got a mortgage, he’s got debts. And he wasn’t working because he was running for Senate.
He says very colorfully, and we quote it in one of the chapters, that many candidates lose an election and then they can take some time off and sit on a beach, or go hike the Appalachian Trail to shake it off. But he had to get back to work because he’s got debts and things that were piling up. This is somebody who managed to make it work, but it’s incredibly hard. Again, it’s incredibly hard for everybody — but that much harder for somebody who can’t just put everything aside.
Party Gatekeeping
Rory Truex: I want to get at the gatekeeping piece of what you describe. We know political parties play a huge role in who gets tapped to run, who gets nominated, who gets resources thrown behind them. It seems like parties — both parties in the US, and parties across the world — often gravitate towards non-working class candidates because they view them as more reliable. Can you illuminate that for us?
Noam Lupu: We know there are party gatekeepers who play an enormous role around the world in selecting candidates — or even before selecting candidates, encouraging people to run for office. That has a huge effect on whether or not people run for office. The people that they encourage are often people who are already within their network. So that’s the piece of: if you’re already giving up your time working for a political party, you’re going to be more likely to be the kind of person who’s in their orbit, and they’re going to encourage those kinds of people. That’s already selecting a fair amount of working class people out because they don’t have the time to devote.
In many countries, these gatekeepers are doing the actual selecting. To some extent, because of our open primaries, we have some ability for people to select into running for office if they can manage to get all the signatures and all the paperwork. Americans often overestimate how individualistic running for office is in the US. Parties still play a huge role in helping candidates run, even in primaries.
But those gatekeepers are trying to deal with the electoral incentives that they have. They want to get their people elected. They want their party to win office. They have a budget constraint and a time constraint, and there are lots of demands on their own time and resources. So they want candidates who are going to have the easiest possible time and the most likely to win.
If you’re a gatekeeper and you have two equally electorally viable candidates, but one is going to have a harder time running for office and doing the canvassing and attending all the fundraising meetings, you’re going to go with the person who’s going to find those things easier to do, easier to accommodate within their schedule.
So there’s a structural bias that makes it harder for working class people to run for office. And then that gets magnified by the fact that parties and gatekeepers have an incentive to choose people who are going to have the easiest possible time running — who they have to invest in the least. That just magnifies the effect.
Why the Standard Solutions Don’t Work
Rory Truex: We’ve spent a good amount of time diagnosing the problem and the consequences. Let’s move now to solutions. One of the most interesting parts of your work is that the standard solutions people bandy about might not actually be the ones we need.
A lot of people focus on the economic aspect directly: elections are expensive, so we need campaign finance reform — public financing, less money spent on elections. That’s solution one. Solution two is that legislators need to make more money. If it’s a better paid job, it will attract more people to run, and we’ll get a more diverse pool. Those are the straight economic solutions.
In your book, you talk about how those might help, but probably not as much as we would expect. Nick, can you tell us why these two solutions — legislator pay and campaign finance — might not do the trick?
Nick Carnes: Sure. These are the solutions you often hear people put forward, and that we often hear when we present research on this. Often it’s, “Well, then is the answer public financing?” Every two years in the US after we have state leg elections, you’ll hear a round of calls for: we need to pay our state legislators more, because working class people can’t afford to run.
We’ve looked at this directly, and there isn’t really evidence for either of those stories or either of those policy interventions. Countries that have publicly financed elections don’t have many more working class people going on to hold office. Here in the US, I’ve done research with Eric Hanson at Loyola looking at US states that offer higher salaries to state legislators, and they don’t have more working class people running for office or going on to hold office.
The argument we outline in this book explains why neither of these interventions work. The real problem is that running for office is so personally burdensome, and these gatekeepers know that and select people who they think are going to have an easier time to support. So if you raise the pay, you’re basically just making the prize at the end of this contest a little bit better. But that doesn’t help.
If I sprain my ankle, and you tell me, “Well, we’re going to raise the prize for winning a foot race” — that doesn’t help me. My ankle’s still sprained. I’m not going to win. But now more people are going to run in this race because the prize is so much bigger. You didn’t address the problem. Raising the pay doesn’t address the fact that the entire time you’re campaigning — for six months, a year, however long your campaign cycle is — you’re not getting that salary. You’re still doing the unpaid work of campaigning. That’s what’s keeping working class people from even considering running, to say nothing of the salary they would earn later on.
Or public financing. Sure, if we could publicly finance elections, that would maybe help address one part of the things that make running for office burdensome. But you would still have to spend lots and lots of time building relationships with party leaders, campaigning, knocking on doors, managing your organization, advertising, earned media. Fundraising is unpleasant. No one likes fundraising in campaigns. But that’s just one of many things keeping working class people from running. So just fixing that one thing still leaves this incredibly uneven playing field that working class people often just can’t afford to take on, with or without public financing in place.
That’s exactly what we see when we look at real-world interventions. I wish it were that easy, and I wish there were a silver bullet policy out there. These might still be good ideas for other reasons. Given the scope of what a US state legislature manages, increasing salaries can be a good thing in a lot of places. Here in North Carolina, a state legislator from the western part of the state might actually lose money if they drive in to work a day in the state legislature, and then drive back — if the per diem isn’t high enough, with gas prices what they are, they might literally lose money.
So there are lots of places where public financing is a great idea. Paying politicians more — I know this is a hot take — paying politicians more is a good idea in many times and places. Neither of those things should be marketed as a way to increase worker officeholders. Maybe good ideas, but not a solution to this problem.
What Actually Works
Rory Truex: So give me some solutions. Noam, why don’t we start with you. Give me a policy, or a place, or a program that you think has made a difference.
Noam Lupu: There’s a bunch of things we talk about in the book. We’ve also been working with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to put together a report and a great advisory committee — a report on what could be done to address the obstacles working class people face in running for office, in the US in particular.
One of the things we mention is that we need more studies of these kinds of interventions to really understand what’s going to work and how it should be structured. But there are some fairly straightforward things likely to work because they address what we see as the root causes.
Things like allowing candidates to use fundraising funds for personal expenses, family expenses, childcare — income replacement. Addressing one of the problems of running for office, which is that you’re foregoing income to do this thing.
Another thing we think would be very sensible is to do something similar to what we do with jury duty, where you can’t be fired if you get called up for jury duty and your employer has to keep your job available. Obviously you have to figure out a way of implementing this where it doesn’t get abused. But for people who are serious contenders running for office, they should be able to go back to their job when the campaign period ends, if they lose the election. Again, that addresses one of the things we think is a cause of this issue, which is that there’s a lot of uncertainty there — people can’t give up their job and expect to be able to get one if they lose the election.
Nick Carnes: I’ll just pile on. There are lots of things that political parties, interest groups, philanthropists can do. The New Jersey AFL-CIO has run for two decades a labor candidate school that involves identifying, recruiting, training, supporting working class candidates regardless of partisanship. This model works really well for them. Their candidates have a seventy-five percent win rate, hold offices up and down the ballot. The advantage of that kind of approach is it doesn’t require passing a law. It’s something an interest group can do. It’s something a political party organization can do.
Party organizations can diversify their own leadership. A political party that has more working class people in its party organization, in its leadership, will have more working class people in its candidate pool, will put more workers on ballots, and will send more workers to elected office.
There are lots of ways to support working class people while they’re running. We often think about campaign financing — how do you pay for your campaign? But shifting the spotlight, as Noam touched on, to how do you pay for your life while you’re campaigning? Those kinds of programs have different names — political scholarships, fellowship programs — but there are lots of models being used right now to identify promising candidates, give them a fellowship where they work a job that has some policy and public engagement implications, but also allows them to get their feet under them politically.
We can start thinking about creating programs dedicated to working class people. The key is really just defining the working class in a consistent way and sticking to it. The danger in these kinds of programs is that if you’re a political party or interest group, you’re always going to be tempted to stretch your definition of working class to fit a candidate who doesn’t really belong in that group, but you like for other reasons. But a political party that said, “We’re really dedicated this cycle. Ten, twenty percent of our candidates are going to be from working class jobs” — they know how to do this. It’s not rocket science. They know how to identify, recruit, and train candidates.
There are a lot of opportunities. There are ways we can change the laws around elections, and there are also things that party organizations and civic groups can do right now, without changing the laws or amending the Constitution.
Noam Lupu: For the book we talked to gatekeepers — party leaders — in a variety of different countries, a variety of different parties. We structured a conversation that didn’t initially say, “We’re interested in working class candidates.” We asked them about candidate recruitment generally, and eventually got to talking about working class candidates.
I don’t think a single one — Nick, if you remember differently — but I don’t think a single one of those parties had a committee or an internal organization focused on recruiting working class candidates. They did have committees to recruit young people. They had committees to recruit women. They had committees to recruit minorities and sometimes immigrants, depending on the country. So this is just something that hasn’t made it. Often when we brought it up, they were surprised. They were like, “Oh, we really should do that.” Especially center-left parties.
So it is something party organizations can do. As Nick said, it runs some risks because you can stretch these definitions in ways that then make it easy for you to check a box but not actually check the box. But these are some ideas for the kinds of things that could be done — at least without wholesale changing our political system, which is also something we talk about in the book.
Rory Truex: Tell us a little bit about that piece at the end. Often people talk about actual electoral reform. I had Lee Drutman on many months ago, and there’s a growing appetite for changing our rules and getting away from a two-party system completely. Then you could imagine a world where parties like the Working Families Party — my guess, you all probably have the data — but I think there are fringe, small third parties, fourth parties in the US that might do a better job at this than the more institutionalized parties. Do you think these bigger picture electoral reforms could help?
Nick Carnes: I’ll be a wet blanket and say no. But they’re good ideas for other reasons. One thing we’ve noticed, if we look cross-nationally: the structure of elections — whether they’re first-past-the-post single-member district, or proportional multi-member district — the structure of elections doesn’t really influence the rate at which working class people go on to hold office. So there may be many wonderful reasons to change fundamentally the way we aggregate votes here in the US. I don’t think, based on what we’ve seen cross-nationally, that will by itself affect worker office-holding.
If we want to think about structural reforms that would ensure our government institutions look like our population, it would be something even more dramatic to most audiences here in the US: something like reserved seats. In almost every other democracy in the world, reserved seats are used to ensure there is some minimum number of women who go on to hold office. The US is one of the only countries that doesn’t have reserved seats for women. You could imagine developing a program like that in the US and also extending it to thinking about occupational backgrounds. It’s not inconceivable. In fact, most countries have ways of building into their electoral process guarantees that groups that previously were kept out of office have a seat at the table, no matter what happens in any given election.
The other option we’ve been researching, and that I think there’s a lot of really exciting work on, is citizen assemblies that run alongside elected legislatures. In many cities, provinces, countries, there are citizen assemblies that are selected at random — or can use stratified sampling to ensure they represent the country as a whole — and that operate in an advisory capacity.
In Lisbon, for instance, when they elect the city council, shortly after that they appoint a randomly selected citizen assembly, a group of citizen volunteers who meet over two weekends to create a program of: “These are the things we want the city council to work on this cycle.” Those programs take away all the problems associated with elections and basically allow us to get the voices of working class people into the political process in a way that we’re not really thinking about right now when we’re just changing the rules around how we run elections. We can also think about institutions that don’t rely on elections.
Rory Truex: I love that part of your book, and I think it’s something that people will have to begin to wrap their heads around more. We think of elections and democracy as synonymous, but you can have democratic practices that don’t rely on elections at all — that get people into the room and give them a voice without having them run for something. This idea of a random lottery is an ancient idea about democracy, and it’s nice to see you all bring it up.
On Democratic Restoration
Rory Truex: I want to close with one final big-picture question. We know that trust in democracy, faith in democracy is low not just in the US, but across much of the Western world. In your book, you draw a link between this and the fact that people don’t feel seen and heard by the system. Can you elaborate, especially in this moment of democratic erosion in the US and elsewhere?
Noam Lupu: I think it’s pretty easy to tie these threads. I would start by saying that a lot of these things we need to study a little bit better to be able to conclusively tie all of them together. But it’s certainly the case that people are becoming disillusioned with democracy around the world. In the US, it’s also the case that people in particular don’t trust representative institutions and don’t trust politicians. There’s a distance that’s emerged between people and their elected representatives, and they don’t feel like they’re being listened to, or that representatives are responding to them.
There’s a lot of research to show that they’re not responding to them — that a lot of what politicians respond to is the preferences of the elite, and not so much the preferences of working class people, or even middle class people in many cases. To my mind, it’s easy to draw that line that says: part of what’s happening here is that people don’t see themselves in those representative institutions.
Maybe they never did. The US has always been a little bit more of an elitist democracy than Western European democracies. But I think this is true even in Western Europe and other parts of the world where there was a moment when people saw themselves in representative institutions and in political parties that really advocated for labor — and called themselves Labour parties. That has declined, and that moment has passed. There is a real sense that there are elites who run governments, and sometimes they respond to us, but most of the time they’re not listening.
Nick Carnes: I’m maybe naively optimistic, but I see democratic backsliding and I see, in the not-too-distant future, democratic restoration. We are in a moment — I think it’s indisputable — where electoral democracy, representative democracy are under extreme duress in the US, around the world. And it’s my sincere hope and belief that we will soon be in a moment of democratic renewal.
When people start asking these questions of how do we rebuild democracy, how do we rethink it, how do we make it better and bring in new forms of democracy — I hope that the kinds of conversations we’re having in this book will continue into that stage. A crisis is also an opportunity. So when I look at the state of the world today, I say: okay, we need to have the ideas ready when it’s time to rebuild democracy. We need to have the ideas ready that will allow us to rebuild it in a way that’s inclusive of working class people. The inclusion of working class people can be a part of the solution, can be a part of restoring faith in democracy. And programmatically, we need to start from that foundation and say: when we rebuild, when we strengthen, when we renew our institutions, part of that program can be making sure working class people have a seat at the table.
Rory Truex: Well said, and a nice place to end. Thank you to our speakers, Noam Lupu and Nick Carnes. Their book is called Keeping Workers Off the Ballot. It is available for pre-order — it’s not out yet, but you got a good taste of it today. You can find it on the Princeton University Press website. I would encourage you to order it there and never through Amazon, if you can afford it. Thank you both for coming. I really appreciate your work, your effort, and your spending time with us today.
