2025/10/27 by Manuel Wagner, Laurenz Ennser‐Jedenastik · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Labor Movements and Unions #Social Policy and Reform Studies #Gender Politics and Representation
paper · doi:10.1080/13501763.2025.2578284
Working-class descriptive representation in Europe has declined significantly over the past decades. To better understand this transformation, we expand on previous approaches that use relatively narrow measures of class background by analyzing the full class biographies of approximately 2000 government ministers in eight European democracies (1945–2020). We also examine individuals' trajectories from the working class into full-time politics, distinguishing between those with social mobility outside, while in, or through politics. Our findings confirm a decline in working-class representation, whether defined by family background, prior occupations, or both. While Social Democratic parties show higher levels of working-class representation, the relative decline is comparable across party families. Yet, studying the pathways into politics highlights important partisan differences. Non-Social-Democratic parties have always predominantly recruited working-class individuals after experiences of upward mobility. In contrast, it used to be common for Social Democratic ministers to have entered politics directly from the working class, but this has declined drastically, while Social Democratic recruitment of former working-class individuals after upward mobility has remained stable. Thus, not only the extent but also the nature of working-class descriptive representation has changed significantly, particularly in Social Democratic parties. We discuss the implications of these trends for substantive and symbolic representation.