Legislator Income and Voting Behavior

Abstract

The study of the impact of legislators' social and economic backgrounds on their behavior in office has been revived in recent years, fueled by debates on representational inequalities. We contribute to this literature by focusing on the case of Switzerland, which has a militia parliament. Taking advantage of the variation in legislators' income levels, we analyze the effect of income on their voting behavior based on the complete voting record of the Swiss lower chamber during the 2007-2011 legislative period. Based on an extension of the two-parameter IRT model, we find that legislators who belong to the top income group are significantly more conservative on economic issues than representatives with lower incomes. We find no such effect for sociocultural issues. Furthermore, counterfactual analyses show that for a considerable share of proposals income affects legislators' voting behavior in nonnegligible ways. This suggests that vote outcomes could be different if the socioeconomic composition of parliament mirrored that of citizens more closely. Therefore, our results are important for our understanding of the impact of the descriptive representation of income groups on their substantive representation.

Keywords: Descriptive representation, economic inequality, roll call votes, Switzerland