Drawing on examples from across Latin America, Chapter 1 introduces the political exclusion of the working class and the puzzles that motivate the book: (1) Do citizens – and particularly working-class citizens – want to be represented by members of the working class? (2) Do citizens know workers are in office? (3) How do citizens evaluate workers who do not represent working-class policy interests? The chapter previews our theory in general terms and provides an overview of the data and cases we use to tackle these important questions. The chapter concludes by introducing the major implications of our findings.

Chapter 5 turns to an examination of the ties between working-class representatives and constituents, by taking an in-depth look at the relationship between labor unions, political parties, and workers in Argentina and Mexico. We show that the evolution of unions and parties throughout history lead to working-class deputies in Argentina having stronger ties to workers and a better track record of policy representation than working-class deputies in Mexico. Then we leverage an original dataset of working-class representation over time and across states in Argentina and Mexico to show empirically that whereas increases in working-class representation in Argentina are associated with citizens evaluating their representative institutions more positively, the increased presence of working-class legislators in Mexico leads to backlash and more negative evaluations of legislatures and political parties.

Chapter 8 summarizes our theory and central findings, and synthesizes findings from the cross-national analyses, in-depth case studies, and original survey data. We show how the different pieces of evidence from across the five empirical chapters fit together to explain that voters do want to be represented by workers, that voters are aware of working-class representation, and that both numeric and policy representation produced by working-class representation is necessary to engender trust in institutions. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of our theory for growing dissatisfaction with the way democracy functions across the region and the world, and for the political inclusion of marginalized groups.

Chapter 4 examines working-class deputies’ propensity to engender positive evaluations of representative institutions conditional on policy proposals of working-class deputies. Using our original survey data, we show that the average citizen believes working-class deputies are more likely to understand the problems they face, and promote policies to address them compared to upper-class deputies. Then we show that citizens represented by working-class deputies who propose specific pro-worker policies are much more likely to positively evaluate their representatives and political institutions. We use an original survey experiment fielded in Argentina and Mexico wherein we directly manipulate deputies’ class background and whether working-class numeric representation is or is not accompanied by policy representation designed to improve the lives of workers. Overall, we find that both the inclusion of working-class representatives, combined with policy representation of workers, has the largest effect on improving how well citizens feel represented. Numeric representation without policy representation, or policy representation without inclusion, only has minor effects.