Are you interested in social class? I've two working papers which show:
1️⃣ Using actor recordings of different accents, that people derive class from accent and this causally influences trait evaluations
2️⃣ That class-based descriptive representation improves support for the political system.
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Randomising people to verbal vignettes by professional voice actors in a survey, we find:
- That people readily attach class to different accents
- more working-class candidates are seen as slightly less competent and likely to succeed, but far more warm and generally more desirable as MPs.
And whilst a lot of the effects on traits are via class (i.e., accent influences perceived class), accent also has quite large effects through some other path...
_And_ we show this is basically the case for candidate desirability as well -- people prefer working-class candidates.
Overall:
- Little bias against working-class candidates
- Accents signal class
- These 'inferred class cues' like accent & dress matter for evaluations.
In a second paper with @turnbulldugarte.com, we ask: Does working-class descriptive representation enhance perceptions of system legitimacy?
Using two survey experiments, we argue that (1) it does, quite a lot (2) this is for candidates and institutions (3) it is conditioned by class identity.
In the first experiment, we just give people descriptions of potential candidates.
The working-class candidate increases views they'd be responsive, similar, and more likely to make trustworthy decisions.
This is conditioned by strength of identity.
People who identify (more strongly as) working-class react more positively to the working-class candidate and more negatively to the upper-class candidate.
And about 66% of respondents identify as working-class, so that's a lot.
In the 2nd experiment, we:
1. Add a middle-class treatment
2. Give an example of a parliament with low and high representation of the different classes
And find the same. Parliaments with high working class representation are preferred by working-class identifiers, even compared to mid-class parls
The takeaway is that the declining faith in politics and institutions may be in part to the lack of socio-economic diversity amongst political elites.
Paper: djdevineorg.wordpress.com/wp-content/u...
This is really interesting. Do you think the large differences between Estuary English and Multicultural London English could be caused partly by assumptions about age and ethnicity? MLE is a younger, more ethnically diverse accent than EE.
Perhaps. It's a regret that we didn't ask other attributes of the candidates. I would guess it's also partly because it's hyper-local, basically confined to inner London, in a way EE isn't.
