Who is better represented? Assessing the affluence bias in Latin America

While social scientists have long sought to measure social class, recent efforts in political science have increasingly focused on assessing the affluence bias in Western democracies. Yet, existing studies rely heavily on preference-based measures of representation, as obtaining comparable measures of legislators’ social class remains challenging, and publicly available sources remain scarce. In this article, we assess policy-makers’ class background using elite-level surveys from 17 Latin American countries, developing two class measures based on legislators’ occupation before taking office. Consistent with prior research, our findings suggest that the social class of national legislators is clearly skewed toward the affluent in most countries, revealing a stark imbalance between the class composition of elites and that of the general public. Furthermore, the results suggest that the presence of working-class policy-makers has been historically low, remaining stable in most countries over the past decades. The accompanying dataset and code can be used to calculate cross-national measures of elites’ social class and facilitate the inclusion of social class as a variable in analyses of legislators’ attitudes, preferences, and behavior.