Can Descriptive Representation Help the Right Win Votes from the Poor? Evidence from Brazil

Abstract

The electoral success of the Right in poor nations is typically attributed to nonpolicy appeals such as clientelism. Candidate profiles are usually ignored because if voters value class-based descriptive representation, it should be the Left that uses it. In this article, we develop and test a novel theory of policy choice and candidate selection that defies this conventional wisdom: it is the Right that capitalizes on descriptive representation in high-poverty areas. The Right is only competitive in poor regions when it matches the Left's pro-poor policies. To credibly shift its position, it nominates candidates who are descriptively closer to the poor. Using a regression discontinuity design in Brazilian municipal elections, we show that Right-wing mayors spend less on the poor than Left-wing mayors only in low-poverty municipalities. In high-poverty municipalities, not only does the Right match the Left's policies, it also does so while nominating less educated candidates.Verification Materials: The materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/DQTIR4. R ight-wing parties often win elections in developing nations where voters are overwhelmingly poor. Prevailing explanations for this puzzle typically focus on how they build a portfolio of electoral appeals such as clientelism (Murillo and Calvo 2019), ethnic mobilization (Huber 2017), positioning on "social" dimensions (Tavits and Potter 2015), or private provision of social services (Thachil 2014). The case of Brazil is similar: clientelism and personalistic politician-voter ties have been the primary explanation for why "conservative parties fare best electorally among relatively poor, less educated" voters (Mainwaring, Meneguello, and Power 2000), despite the fact that the Left is more likely to support redistributive policies.Not surprisingly, these explanations seldom focus on the descriptive profile of the candidates nominated by the Right. The literature on political behavior suggests that voters value descriptive representation (Carnes and Lupu 2016;Dal Bo et al. 2019), and are more likely to trust and feel included by politicians descriptively closer to them (Gay 2002;Hayes and Hibbing 2017;Lawless 2004). In turn, when politicians stress that "I am one of you," their common identity helps them to better understand the needs of voters (Carnes and Lupu 2015), and provides incentives for the betterment of the status of their shared social group (Shayo 2009). Thus, if there are electoral returns to class-based descriptive representation, it is natural to expect that Left-wing parties are the ones that capitalize on it in poor areas. Former Brazilian president Lula (2003-10) is a clear example. He often used his lack of education to emphasize his ability to succeed as a politician, and to implement redistributive policies, mentioning, for example, t...