Careerism and working-class decline: The role of party selectorates in explaining trends in descriptive (mis-)representation

Abstract

Recent decades have seen a growing underrepresentation of working-class legislators and the parallel rise of professionalized “career politicians”, especially in centre-left parties. While this changing class composition of parliaments has implications for representational inequality, we know little about its reasons. I focus on the candidate nomination processes in the German Social Democratic Party to understand the priorities and practices of party selectors. Drawing on interview data with key actors in the nomination processes for the 2021 federal election, I show that the representation of marginalized groups becomes more important, but class representation is excluded from party debates. Although many selectors share the view that the candidates’ narrowing class backgrounds impede the representation of lower-class constituents, they see the reasons for this development mainly in individual obstacles beyond their control. Thus, while the nomination procedures disadvantage working-class people, they do so in a more complex way than previous studies suggest.