Do Citizens Prefer Affluent Representatives? Evidence from a Survey Experiment In Switzerland

Abstract

Most representatives in democratic legislatures are vastly better off than the citizens they are elected to represent. This raises the question of why it is that legislatures in democratic countries are so systematically run by the affluent. One answer to this question could be that voters prefer to elect affluent rather than less affluent candidates. In this paper, we report on the results of a candidate choice experiment conducted among Swiss citizens. We presented respondents in our experiment with pairs of hypothetical candidates to the lower chamber of parliament and asked which of the two they would prefer to elect as their representative. The results of our experiment show that citizens in Switzerland prefer to elect candidates with lower rather than higher salaries. This casts doubt on the idea that voters are responsible for the shortage of less affluent officeholders in democratic legislatures.