“I am just like you!” – Can politicians appeal to social classes via lifestyle cues

Politicians today often showcase their lifestyle choices and activities directly to voters via social media, to show who they are privately. It is often thought that politicians often might try to portray themselves as more down-to-earth and ordinary, to signal similarity to most voters. However, given that politicians live a rather privileged life, they also often display finer and more exclusive lifestyle preferences. Previous studies have looked at the general effect of when politicians provide privatized information about themselves. However, posts about lifestyle signals also contain social signals that might appeal differently to different groups of voters. With inspiration from Bourdieusian theory, I argue that this variation of lifestyle cues from politicians signals different social class associations. I link this line of reasoning to the growing literature on social class appeals and argue that lifestyle cues can be thought of as a different way of appealing to social classes. I theorize that voters either might show a preference for a) politicians showcasing middle-class lifestyle cues (baseline middle-class preference), or b) politicians showing lifestyle cues associated with voters’ own class (class affinity preference). I study this via two survey experiments conducted in Denmark. Study 1 tests voters' class associations of lifestyle cues using real-world Facebook posts from Danish MPs. Study 2 investigates the causal effect of randomly assigning respondents to lifestyle cues with different class signals, in a more controlled experimental setting. Across the two studies, I find that voters do seem to infer class from lifestyle cues provided by politicians, and they do so in similar ways to what they draw out of political posts. Second, in the results from study 1 and preliminary findings from study 2, I mainly find support for the class affinity hypothesis. Citizens tend to prefer politicians showing a lifestyle associated with their class – particularly citizens from the working class. Interestingly, the effect is independent of whether the politician is from voters’ preferred party or not. This indicates politicians indeed can use their lifestyle to appeal to social groups, suggesting voters also use cues that are not explicitly political to form opinions about whether politicians are representatives of their group. In particular, it suggests that the literature should look at not directly political appeals and policy when understanding how parties can attract electorally contested groups such as the working class.