The Impact of Electoral Decision Making on Unequal Representation: Do Poor and Rich Vote Differently?

There is extant literature so far documenting the unequal representation of the interests of economically defined groups. Despite recent advances, the causes for this phenomenon are still unclear. We investigate a so far neglected aspect related to the unequal representation of the poor and focus on their electoral behavior. In short, we argue that more and less affluent citizens differ in how they reach their electoral choice. While more affluent base their vote decision more strongly on their policy preferences, less affluent put more weight on valence aspects, i.e. whether a candidate is regarded as more competent or not. In sum, these differences in voting behavior make it harder for political elites to gauge what the poor want and thus easier to align with the rich. We make use of the integrated CSES dataset to study how income affects the way in which voters rely on different voting heuristics like proximity voting, valence considerations and economic voting in their electoral choice across a diverse set of countries. Our findings suggest that indeed proximity theory is more adequate to explain the voting behavior or rich than of the poor.