New Research Group Probes Why Working-Class Voices Are Vanishing From Parliaments

When citizens look at their national parliaments, they are meant to see a mirror of the society those institutions serve. In practice, the reflection has grown increasingly distorted. People with working-class backgrounds have become markedly underrepresented among legislators across contemporary democracies, while the ranks of professional politicians, individuals whose careers have unfolded almost entirely within the political sphere, continue to expand. A new research effort based at Goethe University Frankfurt now aims to determine what this narrowing of social and professional backgrounds means for the quality of democratic representation, and ultimately for the decisions that parliaments produce.

The project, titled “Class Representation and the Professionalization of Politics: Career Trajectories and Political Inequality in Comparative Perspective,” abbreviated ClassRep, is led by Lea Elsässer, assistant professor of political science with a focus on comparative democracy research in the European multi-level system at Goethe University Frankfurt. The German Research Foundation has awarded the project funding through its prestigious Emmy Noether Program, which enables outstanding early-career researchers to build and independently manage their own research group for six years. The grant amounts to 777,660 euros over the full duration of the project, which will run until May 2032.

Elsässer frames the problem in stark terms. “The social backgrounds of legislators have changed significantly: people with working-class backgrounds are underrepresented, while at the same time, there is an increasing number of ‘career politicians’ with little professional experience outside of politics-related jobs,” she explains. In her view, the urgency of the question is heightened by the current political climate. “Especially in light of widespread dissatisfaction with politics, we need to better understand how this narrowing of professional backgrounds is affecting political decisions and processes,” she adds. Her remarks point to a concern that extends well beyond descriptive statistics: if the people who write laws increasingly share the same narrow career path, whose experiences inform the policies that govern everyone else?

The premise of the project rests on a growing body of evidence in political science. Recent studies have shown that the class background of members of parliament shapes their behavior once in office. Legislators do not arrive in parliament as blank slates; they carry with them the accumulated experiences of their education, their occupations, and the social milieus they inhabited before entering politics. When those experiences cluster within a narrow band of the social spectrum, the argument goes, the perspectives available in legislative deliberation narrow as well. ClassRep seeks to move this research agenda forward by examining not just who sits in parliaments, but how they got there and what difference their journeys make.

Methodologically, the project represents a deliberate departure from the dominant approaches in the field. Much existing research on the social composition of legislatures relies on relatively coarse indicators: whether an MP holds a university degree, or what job they held immediately before entering parliament. ClassRep instead investigates the entire pre-parliamentary career of legislators. This longitudinal view makes it possible to trace how different educational and occupational trajectories, accumulated over years or decades, shape both the opportunities to access political power in the first place and the behavior of legislators once they have secured a seat. The distinction matters because a single snapshot of a politician’s last job can conceal the winding path that led there, including spells in manual labor, public administration, civil society organizations, or party apparatuses that each leave their own imprint.

Central to the project is the concept of “class experiences,” the formative encounters with work, hierarchy, economic security, and social status that accumulate over a career. Elsässer and her group will explore which of these experiences shape the paths into parliament and the behavior of political elites once they arrive. Crucially, the project will also attend to the different experiences of men and women, recognizing that class and gender intersect in ways that produce distinct career trajectories and distinct forms of political representation. A woman’s route into parliament may pass through different occupational sectors, face different barriers, and draw on different reservoirs of professional experience than a man’s, and the research group intends to capture those differences systematically rather than treating class as a gender-neutral category.

The project unfolds in two major steps. The first concentrates on the supply side of political representation: reconstructing and analyzing the full career trajectories that lead individuals into parliamentary office, and identifying how class experiences along those trajectories condition both access to political power and subsequent legislative conduct. The second step turns to the consequences, investigating how the changing social composition and professionalization of parliamentary elites affects political decisions. In other words, the group will not stop at documenting that parliaments have become socially narrower; it will ask whether and how that narrowing is visible in the outputs of the legislative process itself, from agenda-setting to policy choices.

To carry out this ambitious agenda, the Emmy Noether research group combines project management by Elsässer with two doctoral positions and two positions for student assistants. The structure is characteristic of the Emmy Noether Program, which the German Research Foundation designed to offer outstanding early-career researchers a route to qualifying for a full professorship by independently leading a research group over six years. Eligibility extends to postdocs and to professors in fixed-term positions at an early stage of their academic careers. The program runs for a total of six years, with an application for extension required after the first three, a checkpoint that subjects the group’s progress to external evaluation midway through the funding period.

The award’s namesake lends the program considerable symbolic weight. Amalie Emmy Noether, born in 1882 and died in 1935, was a Bavarian mathematician who made fundamental contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics, work that remains foundational to both fields more than nine decades after her death. That a program bearing her name now funds research into political inequality underscores the breadth of the German Research Foundation’s support for early-career excellence across the sciences, from mathematics and physics to the social sciences. For Elsässer, the award provides not only financial security but institutional independence: the freedom to define a research agenda, assemble a team, and pursue a question over a timescale long enough to produce substantive results.

The questions ClassRep addresses could hardly be more timely. Across many democracies, citizens express growing dissatisfaction with politics and with political elites, and researchers and commentators alike have speculated about the role that the shrinking social distance, or in some respects the widening social distance, between representatives and the represented plays in fueling that discontent. If legislators increasingly arrive in parliament via politics-related jobs, with little professional experience in the industries, services, and workplaces where most citizens spend their working lives, the representational link between parliaments and publics may weaken in ways that descriptive statistics on occupation alone cannot reveal. By tracing entire career trajectories, distinguishing the experiences of men and women, and connecting those patterns to concrete legislative behavior and political decisions, the Frankfurt group aims to give that debate an empirical foundation. The results, expected over the course of the project’s run until May 2032, promise to inform not only scholarly debates about political inequality and representation but also broader public discussions about who governs, how they got there, and what their paths mean for the health of contemporary democracy.

Subject of Research: Class representation and the professionalization of parliamentary careers in comparative democracies

Article Title: How representative are our parliaments?

Article References: How representative are our parliaments?. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: political representation, parliaments, working class, career politicians, Emmy Noether Program, German Research Foundation, Goethe University Frankfurt, Lea Elsässer, political inequality, legislative behavior, class background, democracy research