Like ’Em Rich? Public Perceptions and Opinions of Politicians’ Wealth

Voters regularly face financially diverse candidate pools, yet electoral winners tend to be much wealthier than the challengers. What role do public preferences play in this over-representation of wealth? We posit three channels: direct preference for wealthy candidates, indirect preference due to in-group biases, or inadvertent preference due to ignorance about candidate wealth. Drawing on original surveys in the United States, Brazil, Chile, and India, and leveraging conjoint and information experiments, we find that when given information about wealth, the public exhibits a strong preference against wealthier candidates. While the public grossly underestimates the true wealth of politicians, correcting such misperceptions does not significantly change the preferences over candidate wealth. On the margin, the public uses wealth as a proxy for other desirable qualities like skill, but such an inferential shortcut does not boost public sentiments. Partisan bias, however, may produce some indirect support for the wealthy.