Class War in the Voting Booth: Bias Against High‐Income Congressional Candidates

• Published date: 01 February 2020
• Author: John D. Griffin,Brian Newman,Patrick Buhr
• Date: 01 February 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/lsq.12253

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LEGISLATIVE STUDIES QUARTERLY, 45, 1, February 2020

DOI: 10.1111/lsq.12253

JOHN D. GRIFFIN

University of Colorado Boulder

BRIAN NEWMAN

Pepperdine University

PATRICK BUHR

US House of Representatives

Class War in the Voting Booth: Bias

Against High-Income Congressional

Candidates

Do Americans care how much money congressional candidates earn? We

conducted three experiments to examine how candidates’ incomes affect voters’

perceptions of the candidates’ traits and ultimately their vote intention. Subjects

evaluated otherwise identical candidates with annual incomes randomly varying

between $75,000, $3 million, and a candidate with no income information pro-

vided. Results from the three experiments are remarkably similar. Subjects viewed

the $3 million earner as significantly more intelligent than the candidate with

no income information provided, but this benefit of high income was overshad-

owed by significant biases against the $3 million candidate. Subjects consistently

viewed the $3 million earner as less honest, less caring, and less representative

of them than the other candidates. Ultimately, subjects were less likely to say

they would vote for the $3 million candidate. These findings demonstrate that the

campaign advantages that high-income candidates enjoy are somewhat offset by

voters’ initial bias against them.

Do Americans care how much money congressional can-

didates earn? A majority of US Congress members are million-

aires, a fact that has captured media and academic attention

(e.g., Carnes 2013).1

Candidate traits like race/ethnicity (e.g.,

Philpot and Walton 2007), gender (McDermott 1997), and reli-

gion (McDermott 2009) affect how voters perceive and evaluate

candidates, but scholars have just begun to explore whether vari-

ous dimensions of candidates’ socioeconomic status (SES) do the

same (e.g., Carnes and Lupu 2016). Although political scientists

typically think of the umbrella concept of SES in specific terms of

occupation, education, wealth, and income, most of these studies

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