Class act
The left often fixates on politicans' working-class origins - but where they end up may matter more, writes Vladimir Bortun
There is a tendency in debates about political representation to look backwards. We ask where politicians came from: whether they grew up in a council house, whether their parents worked in factories, and, most of all, whether they can credibly claim a working-class upbringing. This is, in fact, a sensible instinct: as my own research shows, these questions matter, and not just symbolically. Class origin, as it turns out, remains one of the most important influences on how politicians make sense of world.
If we stop there, however, we risk missing the most consequential part of the story. While origins do shape political dispositions, it is class destination – where politicians end up, economically and socially – that might ultimately structure their interests and policy preferences. If we are serious about representation, we need to shift our focus accordingly.
The enduring imprint of class origin
In interviews with British MPs, a consistent pattern emerges across partisan lines: politicians locate the roots of their political outlook in their upbringing. Particularly in the case of former Labour MPs from working class origins, family background, financial insecurity, and early exposure to inequality leave a durable imprint. Class origin provides a moral grammar – a way of interpreting fairness, opportunity, and the role of the state.
This is no trivial matter. Politicians from working-class origins often describe themselves as more attuned to redistribution, more sceptical of market outcomes, and more supportive of collective provision than colleagues from more privileged backgrounds. These effects persist even after similar educational and career trajectories. Evidence suggests the same is true for the population as a whole.
At the level of political narrative, too, class origin has become increasingly salient. In a professionalised political class, where occupational diversity has narrowed, emotive origin stories are increasingly mobilised. They are meant to signal authenticity, ground claims to representation, and provide a language through which politicians connect to voters. Starmer’s now infamous toolmaker father may come to mind, but – as my recent research finds – it is Reform candidates who seem particularly keen to mobilise their ‘humble origins’ to manufacture relatability among disillusioned working-class voters. After all, the claim to be on the side of “ordinary people” and against the “out-of-touch elites” remains the crux of populism.
The problem is that when we look at politicians’ actual economic policy preferences, they overwhelmingly reflect their class destinations – mostly professional-managerial or petty bourgeois – rather than origins. In general, they are pro-business rather than pro-worker.
What about what politicians actually do?
If we take a materialist understanding of class seriously, then, the key question is not whether someone once grew up working class, but whether they currently depend on selling their labour to make ends meet. Being working class is first and foremost about economic dependence before it is a job title or cultural identity. Many politicians who grew up in working-class households no longer occupy that social position. They have accumulated assets, built highly paid careers, and entered social worlds that distance them materially from the conditions they once experienced and which many of their voters still do. Their class destination has shifted, and with it their interests. This process can play out in complex, and perhaps counterintuitive, ways: the same research that demonstrated the lingering effects of early socialisation found that “upward mobility from the working class is associated with increased conservatism”.
As substantiated by an emerging body of empirical evidence, when looking at politicians’ occupation prior to coming into office, not only are they significantly more privileged than the average person, but their class destinations condition the direction of their policymaking. In other words, what matters is who the politicians are now rather than who they were when they were growing up. Class destination might even determine where a politician can land a job after their time in office. While this strand of the “revolving door” literature is still rather underdeveloped, it has shown, for example, that “finance ministers, especially from left-wing parties, are more likely to be hired by financial entities in the future if they please their future employers through deregulatory policies during their time in office.”
In other words, without enough working-class politicians, policies risk being calibrated to median or elite experiences. With only about 3-5 per cent of politicians across OECD democracies today entering politics from working-class jobs (despite such jobs making up 56-58 percent of the Labour force), perhaps it is not surprising that said democracies persistently fail to tackle socioeconomic inequalities. This, in turn, creates openings for demagogic challengers who can claim to speak for “ordinary people “even when their policy platforms and track record are just more of the same.
Rethinking representation
What follows from this is not that class origin is irrelevant. It continues to shape political outlooks in important ways. But clearly it is not enough. If we care about representation, we need to pay greater attention to class destination: the current economic position of politicians, including their sources of income and living conditions. The main practical implication is to create pathways into politics for people in working-class occupations. Indeed, why not establish a mandatory quota for elected representatives from working class occupation? This would have to be coupled with closer scrutiny of the material interests of political elites rather than taking claims of identity at face value.
But even that might not be enough. The simple fact is that parliament is an institutional environment that rewards conformity. Beyond financial or career incentives, party discipline and the broader gravitational pull of elite norms all constrain how far the political dispositions of elected representatives translate into policy. Politicians are not merely selected from particular backgrounds, but over time are also re-socialised into a relatively narrow set of perspectives which tend to defend and reproduce the status quo. As Jean Jaurès put it a long time ago, “There is more in common between two parliamentarians, one of whom is a socialist, than between two socialists, one of whom is a parliamentarian.”
There is much more to this question, then, than the class backgrounds of individual politicians. To build genuine, fully-fledged democracy, we must re-establish the institutional links between the working class and its political representatives, through parties, unions, and civic organisations that can anchor those representatives in the material conditions and lived experiences of those they represent.
