Books

Working Class Inclusion: Evaluations of Democratic Institutions in Latin America. w/ Tiffany Barnes and Gregory Saxton.

Published November 2023 with Cambridge University Press.

2024 winner of the Richard Fenno Prize for best book published in legislative studies the previous year, awarded by APSA's Legislative Studies section. 

2024 co-winner of the best book published on Class & Inequality in the previous two years, awarded by APSA's Class & Inequality section.

Summary:

This book examines how the near exclusion of working-class citizens from legislatures affects how citizens perceive they are represented. In doing so, we tackle three important questions. Our first question is: Do citizens—and particularly working-class citizens—want to be represented by members of the working class? We argue that yes!—in theory working-class voters want to be represented by working-class representatives. The reason is twofold. One: the presence of working-class legislators may signal a more inclusive policy-making process. That is, simply having more workers’ in office conveys to citizens that policy-makers care about their experiences, preferences, and policy needs. Two: given that working-class legislators have different policy preferences and advance different policy agendas than white-collar representatives from the same political party, working-class representation may also enhance policy responsiveness. Citizens assume working-class representatives will represent the interests of the working class. Using survey data from across Latin America, and original survey data from Argentina and Mexico we demonstrate that voters want to see more workers in office, that the presence of workers in office is associated with better evaluations of legislatures and political parties, and that many voters believe workers are better suited to represent the policy needs of working-class citizens.

However,  the presence of workers in office can only foster better perceived representation via policy responsiveness if working-class legislators advocate on behalf of the working class. That said, legislators face a number of competing incentives and demands. Not all working-class legislators have the same motivations or opportunities to represent the working class. Consequently, we ask: Will any worker do? Or, in other words, how do citizens evaluate workers who do not represent working-class policy interests? We explain that even though workers all come to office having unique lived experiences that better position them to represent the needs of working-class citizens, once in office workers are faced with a range of competing incentives and opportunities that sometimes preclude their desire and ability to represent working-class interests. We argue for working-class legislators to effectively improve evaluations of representative institutions they should have strong relationships with the disadvantaged group they represent and be committed to advocating for their policy interests. Where working-class politicians enter office and defect—prioritizing their party or other economic interests instead of the working class—we anticipate working-class representatives will invoke backlash and decrease trust in their representatives. In contrast, where workers strive to cultivate working-class support and represent workers’ policy interests, we posit that working-class politicians will increase trust. Drawing on an original dataset on the class backgrounds of Argentine and Mexican national deputies over a 20-year period, survey data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), and original survey experiments in Argentina and Mexico, we demonstrate that where representation of the working class is accompanied by policy representation of workers’ interests, working-class representation engenders trust in representative institutions. Absent policy representation, however, workers in office are met with distrust and generate backlash.

For workers’ presence in office to signal a more inclusive policy-making process, citizens must be able to identify members of the working class in office. Yet, working-class status is arguably more difficult for citizens to observe than characteristics such as race, ethnicity, or gender. Thus, we ask: Do citizens know workers are in office?  We argue that even if voters do not have perfect information, there are a number of ways that citizens learn about working-class representation. Since parties and candidates have political incentives to make politicians’ working-class status known, news sources and governments make information about legislators available and digestible, and people are surprisingly adept at inferring class status from readily available heuristics such as facial images and speech patterns, we explain that citizens have a number of opportunities to learn about the presence—or absence—of workers in office. Leveraging examples from news sources, surveys of government websites and a unique experiment in Argentina and Mexico that tests voters’ abilities to classify the class status of deputies based only on facial images, we provide strong evidence that voters are capable of detecting workers’ presence in office. Furthermore, using survey data from across Latin America we demonstrate that the relationship between working-class representation and positive evaluations of institutions is strongest among those voters who are most likely to be aware of legislators’ class status—i.e., voters with high levels of political interest and avid news followers.

The Power of Opposition: Legislative Effectiveness in Mexico's Multiparty Democracy. w/ Sergio Bárcena Júarez. Forthcoming from Bloomsbury Press (November 2026).

The Power of Opposition: Legislative Effectiveness in Mexico's Multiparty Democracy develops a theory of legislative effectiveness in presidential systems where it is rare for presidents to control a majority of seats in the legislature. Legislators belonging to the president's party are often constrained in their behavior as the executive branch has an overarching interest in ensuring copartisan legislative proposals fit within the president's agenda. Executive bills often require bargains with the opposition to secure votes, and legislators from the president's party may find their bills coopted by the president, or blocked if they conflict with presidential priorities. As a result, legislators from governing parties are generally less effective when it comes to their own initiatives. Presidents allow the opposition to push their own priorities through the legislative process, or provide credit-claiming opportunities on major presidential initiatives. Since opposition legislators can exchange votes on executive bills for presidential support on opposition-led initiatives, they are generally more effective at navigating their own proposals through the legislative process. Yann P. Kerevel and Sergio A. Bárcena Juárez demonstrate support for this argument drawing on extensive quantitative data from Mexico's Chamber of Deputies from 1997-2024, and interviews with numerous lawmakers and staffers.