Sounding the Part: Accent, Class, and Candidate Desirability

Do people like working class political candidates? The experimental and observational research suggests that they do or, at least, do not dislike them. However, existing research is based on text-based treatments, typically providing class cues in the form of occupation or background. But people do not meet political candidates like this, and, if they do at all, instead do so through cues such as how people speak and look. There are few existing studies that test whether these types of class signals yield similar results (for an exception in Latin America, Barnes et al, 2023). This paper exploits the fact that spoken accents are heavily classed in the United Kingdom. Using professional voice actors who are 'native' speakers of five different accents, we use an experimental survey vignette design to test whether people infer class from accents (they do) and whether this has consequences for candidate trait evaluations and desirability. We find, consistent with previous work, that, even absent any other information, people find more working-class candidates more warm and desirable and no less competent nor intelligent than more highly-classed individuals. We also find that accent has a direct effect, not mediated by class, that we cannot explain by respondent-level variables. This paper provides first study on accent, class, and trait evaluations, evidencing that class-based biases extend beyond text treatments and accents have important direct effects. We more broadly discuss these types of 'sociological' explanations for class-based differences.