Who Speaks for the Poor? the Implication of Electoral Geography for the Political Representation of Low-Income and Working Class Citizens

Using census data from the 1880 US census, and the 1881 census of Great Britain, this paper develops a model of strategic party entry, in which party decisions are structured by electoral geography.  This paper will examine the geographic distribution of labor and income, as well as early labor organization efforts, to demonstrate the quite different electoral geographies of North America and Europe. Specifically, urban American electoral districts are much more heterogenous than urban British parliamentary constituencies, and low–income and working–class voters are much less likely to be pivotal in the election of legislators. This has important implications for the incentives of parties to contest elections on behalf of an urban low-income constituency. Although the US and Great Britain provide the focal comparison of this paper, the analysis concludes by demonstrating that the important differences in the composition of urban districts that are observed in this comparison hold true for most European and North American democracies.