Are Workers Effective Lawmakers?

Throughout the country’s history, some politicians and elites have argued that white-collar Americans are more qualified than working-class Americans to govern. To date, however, relatively little is known about the legislative effectiveness of working-class lawmakers. To address this knowledge gap, Jacob M. Lollis, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia, creates a data set merging the occupational background of over 14,000 individual state legislators with their state legislative effectiveness score (SLES) as designed by the CEL. He finds that working-class lawmakers do not underperform white-collar lawmakers. Further, he provides evidence that the gap between working-class and white-collar legislators’ effectiveness is negligible. Given that working-class lawmakers do not underperform their white-collar peers, the primary cause of their numerical underrepresentation in legislatures is likely not their lawmaking abilities.