stories not just the demonstrators in the media that were covering the said lands who were there and able to get the fbi records and i actually talked to some of the people who were pictured and able to identify them and talk to them as well. some kind of a comprehensive story of what happened that day and the impact of that day. >> what was it like talking to some of the crowd members, what were they like? >> was a very unusual situation and i think the fact to draw out their story as well unfortunately some of them are still segregationist and continue to believe that does not mess so the most powerful story that i can across was as a person that actually took the photographs.

he was a white southern photographer and a was during the sit-in's that he had a change of heart and yet he was a segregationist when he walked in and when he walked out because he saw the quiet dignity of the demonstrators against the kind of mob mentality of his friends and neighbors. ..

so his story is really told and then of course with his assassination which is in the book it tells the whole story of what happened and what happened to the movement after his removal from his seat. >> thank you very much for your time. >> thank you. >> up next on booktv "after words" with guest host kim dixon tax policy editor for politico. this week public policy experts nicholas carnes and his first book "white-collar government" the hidden role of class in economic policy making. in it the duke professor explores the socioeconomic background of legislators affecting policy choices while in office. the program is about an hour. >> host: thanks for joining us. white-collar government. one thing that i just found out this morning because i was

reading the book on my kindle is that you have worked in various blue-collar jobs before he became assistant professor. do you want to talk a little bit about yourself and how you see your transition from working class or do you see yourself coming from working-class to the white-collar profession now? >> guest: so i'm definitely a textbook white caller job now being a professor in college is a lot of fun. i don't do a lot of work with my hands. there was a time in my life when i was -- i worked in a pepsi bottling plant in tulsa oklahoma. i was a cashier at the world's largest walmart. i worked at a catfish restaurant and i worked at a dairy queen. that was sort of part of my life i had paid my way through college. i paid my way through a little bit high school too and yeah

these experiences were sort of part of the inspiration for the research that i do right now, so you know my last job before going to graduate school was at it hep c bottling plant in tulsa and i sort of went from that to it tht program in political science at princeton. it was just a night and day difference. that kind of contrast between where i came from and this new world that i wound up in brought a lot of the issues that i talk about in this look into sharper focus. just the differences between how people who have worked in manual labor jobs ,-com,-com ma worked in service industry jobs see the world. the question that i ask a white-collar government is what about politicians? politicians from different classes differently on organic issues and do they see the problems facing this country

differently from politicians who have never had those experiences. they started out in their first job out of the gate was law and business. >> host: overtime you looked at a. period for some of the more microdata from 1999 to 2008 so post-war forward it's been a steady -- it's been a slight increase over time in millionaires in the presidency but it's mostly stable. is that about right? >> guest: that's it ackley right. it's a rare constant in american political life. if you look at congress in 1901, less than 2% of members came from working-class backgrounds. they got into into politics a month up in congress. flash forward to the present day, the average member of congress spent less than 2% of their career doing manual labor jobs, doing service industry

jobs so this is one thing that really hasn't changed. lots of different aspects of the political process. broadcast television, cable news the rise of candidate centered elections and big money in politics and unions and while all of this is happening one of the constants during the last 100 years or so is that working-class people are not getting getting a locked into political office. >> host: you talk about the founding fathers and one founding father you mentioned hamilton a couple of times in the book and his view that the merchant is probably going to be able to represent the worker and probably have his best interests at heart. it sounds like from your data from the studies that you have looked that you don't think that's the case. so, i guess if you would chat about that and was there another

founding father you didn't mention that had the opposite you? >> guest: i'm glad you brought up the founding fathers. the question i talk about in this book is really does doesn't matter that working-class people aren't getting into our political institution and does it matter that almost no one in our policymaking and touche and has real experience as a working-class. that's a debate we have been having in this country since the founding, even earlier. alexander hamilton and james madison weigh in on the federalist papers and their argument is one that has stuck around ever since. at basically boils down to this. it doesn't really matter that there are no working-class people getting into politics as we all want the same rings. we all want prosperity and we all want growth and today was a modern version of that what's good for general motors is good for the country and vice versa and what's the harm in letting the business owners, the white-collar professionals call the shots? we all want the same thing at the end of the day.

this is sort of one really old school of political art in this country. there's another school of political thought, the anti-federalist of the founding railed against this perspective and said no we don't want all the same things. if the government we set up only involves or political decision-makers only come from white-collar professions that's going to seriously tilt the policies they create. it's going to make it harder for the voices of working people to make a difference in the halls of power. and so this is sort of you know a long-standing debate. the reason why i wanted to write this book and why i got interested in this question is that these debates have been going on since the founding and people have brought anecdotes and speculation to these debates but what really interested me about this question was when i started there wasn't really any hard evidence on this point.

once i pointed an example of a white-collar professional who really care about working people and that says that proves it doesn't matter and the other side of working-class candidate who understood the needs of working people and we need more like that. what i wanted to know in his look is if we stop looking at individual cases and look across sort of large samples of politicians and if we look at our political institutions as a whole, does it really matter all that much that white-collar professionals are calling the shots and working-class people are all almost totally absent from our political institutions? so i really wanted to take this whole debate and try to bring the best empirical evidence and the best data i could bring to bear on the question. that is what i have tried to do in this book. >> host: so the main dataset and i think you look at various bits of data and historical data but you looked at 783 lawmakers from 99 to 2008 and they think

that you found 13 of 783 spend a quarter or more in a blue-collar job. talk a little bit more about what the findings were and then i will ask you to talk about linda versus loretta sanchez which is a nice example of does it matter occupation versus income versus socioeconomic status? >> guest: absolutely. one of the real challenges in doing this research was that when i started there wasn't sort of a good database. if you just said what her son of the average member of congress career before they got into office did they spend doing quite caller versus blue-collar jobs. when i started out i couldn't find any sort of database, just a spreadsheet that had this information. the first task for me in this research was just too create that, to go through so at the

help of research assistants i went through all 783 of the unique men and women who served in the 106 through 110th congress from 199,192,008. the question i asked is what did you do for a living before you got into the lyrical office? for each of them we pulled together from a half-dozen different almanacs every piece of information we could find about the jobs they did before they got out of political office. that was sort of an interesting project in and of itself to find out all these different facts. for instance orrin hatch who i always had known -- i knew orin hatch was a lawyer before he got elected to congress but in the course of this research i found out he actually spent a big krzanich of the time before he was a lawyer doing manual labor and service at industry jobs. he was a janitor. he was a receptionist doing what i would call working-class jobs in order to pay his way through law school.

he pulled together every piece of information we could find about this group of 783 modern members of congress. in the course of researching the book i also came across lots of other datasets that have been compiled by other people, scholars and interest groups and what i try to do in the book is really look at all of them and use every available piece of information. and the thing that was really striking to me was that i got the same answer every time whether we were looking at really detailed data on modern members of congress or sort of of -- there is a survey in political science called the modern representation study conducted in 1958. these two political scientists surveyed a representative sample of u.s. house members and they got really detailed information about what they did for a living and what they thought about the issues and how they voted in what committees they were on. and you know once i found --

once i got access to that dataset i brought that into. i got the same answer every time. this was the striking thing to me. every day that said i examined that every local government from every historical time period i always got the same answer that is that politicians from the working-class really do bring a different or specters to political office. the politicians who did white-collar jobs and especially politicians who only did white-collar jobs in the private sector. that really seems to be a major dividing line in political institutions. politicians who did working-class jobs tended to be more for a worker intended to be be -- politicians who did white-collar jobs tended to be less pro-worker or pro-business. whether looking at the 1950s or present day. >> host: how do you define pro-worker and pro-business? >> guest: i tried to use a combination of, let's take roll

call voting for instance. the afl-cio and the chamber of congress -- chamber of commerce ran congress and give them a score of zero to 100. zero means you never voted the way we wanted you to on these key bills that we determined were important and 100 means you always voted the way we wanted you to. looking at the afl-cio scores of the chamber of commerce kohr's legislators from the working-class tend to be more liberal and closer to what the afl-cio wants an further from what the chamber of commerce wants. legislators whose and more of their careers in white-collar jobs especially in business or the private sector tend to be more conservative. they tend to be closer to what the chamber wants. >> host: i mentioned earlier the sanchez example. i think that illustrates the question of why look at occupation.

why not look at education and why not look at income level? could you talk about the sanchez example and occupation? >> guest: in the book i talk about linda and loretta sanchez. they are i believe the first sisters to ever -- in 2003 that became the first sisters to simultaneously serve in congress. what makes them sort of an interesting case study is, so here you have a situation where the gender of the two politicians is the same, the race and ethnicity is the same and they are approximately the same age. they had the exact same family and went to the same schools and grew up in the same places. they represent similar though not identical goal districts. they represent districts in california that are highly democratic. so you have these two politiciapoliticia ns who look as similar as to members of congress could be but the one real difference between the two

of them is that linda sanchez worked as basically a labor and then a union organizer and in a labor lawyer and loretta sanchez worked in the financial sector. the two of them although they are pretty similar on a lot of votes to occasionally break differently. representative linda sanchez tends to vote with the afl-cio and loretta sanchez tends to vote with the chamber of commerce more often. so this is just one case. this is just a manic note. these are two members of congress but the differences you see between the two of them are sort of representative of the larger differences that i see when i look across hundreds of members of congress and look at sort of data from lots of different time periods. politicians, these other things matter. race, gender, constituency and party. all these things are extremely important when a politician tries to decide how to vote on

the bill or, so all these things matter there is an important difference over in the us those things between a politician who has real experience in working-class jobs and a politician had doesn't. on your other question, what is class? this is something that scholars and political scientists and sociologists have in debating for decades. we will probably go on debating for a long time. in the book i sort of come down on the side of saying the right way to think about it persons place in our society or place in our economy is to ask the question that people always ask at cocktail parties which is what do you do for a living? when you meet someone for the first time you don't say what was your income last year or what's the highest degree you have earned or what is your socioeconomic status? you say what do you do? that is essentially --

essentially the question i ask about politicians. what did you do for a living before you got into congress? it's interesting to know how much money they made in the russ is and it's interesting to know how much formal education they had. but when you look at the data those things don't seem to really define politicians the way the previous occupations did what really seems to matter is it's not so much about the exact dollar amount it in a politician's bank account. what really seems to distinguish politicians ideologically or in terms of how they vote or think about the issues is not how much money they made but how they made it. somebody who made it big as a law professor and then wrote a successful book ideologically they will look at it differently than someone who made the same amount of money in investment banking.

>> host: you talked about orrin hatch and we talked about the 13 who had spent a quarter more their time doing something working-class. are there -- among those republicans i think there were four republicans and nine democrats. did you study them and how they compare to other republicans? we talked a little bit about orrin hatch who is reached across the aisle and chuck grassley is on that list who has also been a little unconventional over the years. did you look at that connectivity? >> guest: that's a small sample. if you look at the larger group of politicians, you do see similar patterns. but i think the message you can take away from somebody like orrin hatch, so orrin hatch is the senior senator from one of the most conservative states in the country and very often he votes the way you would expect the republican from a

conservative state to vote. i think he votes with his party and he casts lots of conservative votes. but every now and again senator hatch will reach across the aisle in ways that you wouldn't expect if all that you know about him was that he was a republican from a conservative state. earlier you and i were talking about how he would reach across the aisle when ted kennedy had an important bill to give health insurance to low-income people. a lot of local observers struggle to make sense of the fact that orrin hatch who ordinarily votes republican and who is a republican and from a very conservative state wouldn't tries to make sense of why hatch was so sympathetic when it came to issues like health insurance. but i think you can really understand his position on that issue if you know that he spent

a lot of his life doing manual labor jobs where his access to health insurance was by no means guaranteed. orrin hatch understands what it's like to not have health insurance. i think that helps to explain why a republican senator from a conservative state is going to reach across the aisle sometimes. now that's not by any means -- a really progressive senator and that's important to keep in mind too but there still is a difference between orrin hatch and if you imagine a version of him where he just had it made his whole life and he never had these experienced and -- experiences and never worked as a janitor. my research says you wouldn't see orrin hatch reaching across the aisle. he would probably he farther to the right than he is now. >> host: you talked about manual labor.

how do you find working class? i mean, waitresses i think would qualify for that. where do teachers and you wouldn't consider teachers among the affluent. can you talk about your definitions? >> guest: absolutely. in the book book i could find working class is doing manual labor jobs like a factory worker or service under cheap jobs like a cashier or a restaurant server and i do that -- i think it would be interesting to break politicians down even farther to see the ones who were factories workers look different than the ones that were restaurant service but there are did not call attentions from most backgrounds to break that category down. what about teachers and what about social workers? so i'd let those into a category

i called service space professionals or you would think of as a teacher is it her personal job and this is a white-collar job. it is also not the same as say the a ceo of a large corporation. so in the book i really try to break the arcuate -- occupational coding scheme has 10 different categories i try not to say let's have a one-size-fits-all definition of working-class and white-collar. although when you and i are talking i often say white-collar or working class. book goes a little further in the weeds and actually puts odd patients into 10 different categories. a group those 10 categories into three loose categories, working-class jobs and then white-collar jobs are jobs for you are running a business or doing something like running a dismissed. you are it is this owner or a farmer or a high-level manager in the business and the third

category i have in the look i i call not-for-profit white-collar professions. these aren't necessarily nonprofit jobs in the traditional sense. these are jobs for the person is doing a white-collar job and they enjoy a little bit of material security. day-to-day there've primary goal was not to turn a profit for business. we looked at the data. teachers and the service based professional group generally tends to be ideologically the closest to working-class people. so the most conservative, on average the most conservative politicians tend to be the ones who did profit oriented white-collar jobs in the most progressive pro-worker tend to be politicians who did manual labor and services through jobs. in between, the in between are the politicians who did not-for-profit white-colwhite-col lar jobs. teachers and is tend to be ideologically pretty similar to

manual labor and service industry workers as you have kind of a think intuited. >> host: not as liberal economically. it's a little surprising to me because there's a stereotype of the working-class and this has to do with social issues versus economic issues and i think you talk about that a little in the book. was that surprising to you? >> guest: you know there is this view out there that working-class people are really conservative on social issues. some of that is i think more hype and more speculation and research shows. in my research i focus primarily on economic issues and whether you are looking at public opinion data or data on how members of congress both, on economic issues to get the same answer every time and that's the working-class people tend to

have more pro-worker more progressive attitudes in white-collar professionals especially white-collar professionals who work in business who are in profitable professions. economic issues he now there is a lot of hype about the matter with kansas. it is my home state i would add that there doesn't tend to be a lot of hard research to back up the claims that are made in that book. when you actually look at the data on how ordinary americans think about economic issues and how they vote on economic issues are how they vote in elections, there are big differences between working-class people to be more progressive on economic issues and they tend more likely to be democrats than otherwise. that's exactly what i find when i look at data on members of congress. the ones who did blue-collar jobs tend to be more liberal on

economic issues. i do in the book briefly talk about social issues or not strictly economic issues. for instance so i look at how the afl-cio and the chamber of commerce rates members of congress. also the how the aclu rates members of congress. the surprising thing i think especially in light of all this talk about what's the matter with kansas is there aren't meaningful differences on social issues between a member of congress and the working-class and the politician coming from a white-collar profession. on social issues there is really nothing to write home about in the research i have done. where class really seems to matter is and when we are voting on moral or religious issues. it's when congress is voting on what do we set the tax rate for rich people had or how generous

is our social safety net or we going to get people unemployment insurance? that is where we see congress in different classes breaking in different directions. the question is a moral or -- moral issue or social issue to see the big gaps you would expect. if you believe there was something the matter with kansas. >> host: you look at roll call votes and the chamber ranking system and then he looked at i guess you i guess you call it the pre-voting process and primarily sponsorship of bills and how intensely i think is the word you used in terms of the intensity of members who had a work in class background versus those with a white-collar ground and if you can talk about what you found there? >> guest: absolutely. i look at how members of congress vote on economic issues and there are the differences are crystal clear. working class politicians tend to be more pro-worker and white-collar politicians tend to

be more pro-business or conservative. what happens if you shift gear and focus on the pre-stage. a lot of people would say that is where the action is in our legislature. stop the floor vote. it's although negotiating and coalition building that happens behind the scenes. in the look i look at data on three things. the goals legislators pursue so the types of those they introduce, how hard they work to see them pass and how likely they are to succeed. so goals, effort and effectiveness. when i look at the goals legislators pursue a find the same differences you see if you look at how they vote. legislators from working-class tend to cast more pro-worker boats. they also tend to introduce ills that are more pro-worker than legislators from white-collar professions. what is really interesting though is they also tend to work significantly harder to try to pass them. in one analysis i look at how many co-sponsors a legislator

recruits which is sort of a rough measure of how hard they are working to pass a though. i find a legislator from the working-class when they introduce a bread-and-butter domestic economic bill they recruit twice as many co-sponsors as a legislator from a white-collar profession which to me says legislators from working-class are not only more pro-worker and how they have vote but also investing more energy to try to pass the kinds of economic policies of most americans really care about. ..

to the extent we care about every once of waste or having a seat at the table in the political institution that says first of all there aren't that many working-class people introducing bills and second of all the few working class people who get into office and the proposals to introduce get screened out much faster so that's really sort of a double whammy in terms of the content of the legislative process working class people's voices

aren't being heard in the first place and when the people do get into office their voices are getting filtered out at a high rate. >> host: i think we are about to take a break. we are back talking about white collar government. we talked about the working class, the small number of people through working-class backgrounds who are in congress that work twice as hard if you measure like trying to get bills passed and i guess they were only as effective as from another group. why don't we switch and talk

about the role of ideology? you made the contrast in the book between our people just out of touch with people from different glasses or are they out of step and i think that you found that they are not out of touch they are out of step. can you talk about that distinction that you make? >> if you look at how the politicians of different class's vote the tend to be more progressive. you might look at that result and say it's just these white collar professionals to get into the political institutions. they don't know the facts on the ground. they don't know what it's like to be a working class person if we just got them the information and educated them, they would think differently or vote differently. that is one story we can tell about the politicians from white-collar jobs are sort of more conservative. another version or another story that we can tell is politicians

from white collar jobs they just have more conservative views. working-class people tend to have a more progressive perspective on economic issues and white collar people tend to have a more from decades of public opinion research. maybe the same is true for politicians and if that is the case, then just educating them about the reality for working class isn't going to do much because they know the facts and it's not that the need to be taught how the economy works it's that they know how it works and their view is sort of a more conservative view and so what i try to do in the book is determined which of these two explanations seems to be the most important for helping us figure out why politicians from the working class and white collar jobs are so different when they get into office and the one that seems to carry more

of the weight is the explanation they just think differently about the issues. a member of congress has all of the informational resources they could possibly need. if anything they have too much information floating around them and the interest groups and lobbyists and they have the gao. there is no shortage of information. if a politician who had never done a blue-collar job wanted to know what it was like they could find out in a heartbeat. and so i find in the bucket is in the case of the white collar jobs are out of touch. it's not that they don't know what working class people want it's that they want something different. their own views are more conservative or pro-business. if you look at surveys of politicians done in the 50's and in the 90's and just one that was done in 2012. so people survey members of

congress or state legislators and they ask them not sort of what positions do you take publicly but what is your own view on the economic issues? if it were up to you with the government be more involved or less involved in the economy? and across the board those surveys have consistently showed no time and again politicians of the working class their own views are more progressive and politicians from white collar jobs it is their own views that are more pro-business or conservative. >> but they have these opinions and they probably would call themselves pro-business or pro worker also. there's a debate about the minimum wage is they're not about whether increasing the minimum wage past a certain point would lead to layoffs are you making an assumption that a democrat would make about what's good for the worker?

>> i try to look at differences and how ordinary americans think about these issues so we know they tend to be more supportive of increasing minimum wage and we know the professionals are less supportive of increasing the minimum wage so why try to take that as my starting point and asked do we see the same patterns, and we do and the message this is not a book about whether increasing the minimum wage is good or bad for the economy this is a book about whose views are represented in the halls of power and so i'm not an economist and i can't tell you what the optimal minimum wage use. i can tell you working-class people want the minimum wage to be high year but white-collar professionals are the ones running the political institutions and that's part of why it is so hard to raise the minimum wage. >> host: you talked about hypothetical the examples in the book and i think you looked at 15 big major votes. 56 and then you looked at some

of the big votes in the last decade or so, the bailout during the financial crisis, the tax cuts before that. can you talk about you looked at those votes with the other institutions that passed the bush tax cuts that all americans benefited from that that wealthy americans benefited proportionately more. what would have been different if i guess you looked at it if congress was balanced according to the population. >> one of the questions i'm really interested in, sure it matters on the margin whether a politician did manual laborer jobs or white collar jobs. but the question i want to know is does it matter for public policy? with the final result of the legislative process look different or are we talking about moving one or two votes are now? it doesn't matter so one of the things i do in the book is i

just take 15 important economic policies from the list of the sort of important enactments compiled by another political scientist for totally unrelated projects so why take the list of important enactments for the years 1999 to 2008 when i have really good data what members of congress did for a living and i take the 50 some important enactments that he's identified and a pullout the 15 that are directly related to the domestic economic policies and i say okay on these 15 landmark economic bills, with the outcome of the final passage vote have been different if the, chris looked like the country as a whole, if congress hadn't been sort of massively skewed in favor of white collar professionals? that is a tough question to answer because we've never actually seen a congress that looked like the country as a

whole in terms of its occupational background. but what i do in that part of the book is i we wait members of congress just like if you were to run a public opinion survey and as your sample was a little bit off balance you would leave late the individual participants in the survey. i do the same thing with members of congress. so in congress the lawyers are about 50 times more numerous than in the general public. so why take every lawyer and instead of giving them one vote on save the 2001 push tax cuts they get one 50th of a vote and every member of congress from the working class which is sort of under represented by the factor of 50 so i really to the members of congress and then just tally up and see what the final passage vote would be. what i find is pretty striking so take the example of the 2001 bush tax cuts that is a bill

that didn't get a single vote from someone with real experience in the working-class and if you sort of rebate the members of congress you get this congress that looks like the country as a whole and that's got the same mix of occupations as the united states, landmark conservative economic policies of several landmark conservative economic policies wouldn't have reached a majority vote in congress that looked like the country as a whole including the 2001 bush tax cuts which most people regard as pretty regressive revisions of the federal tax code. so, i do know, the take-home from that, this is of course just all a simulation. i can't really tell you what a class balanced congress would have done with george w. bush tax proposals. but i can tell you if we just really to the members of congress so that our institution, our congress looks

like all of us, you can't pass the 2001 bush tax cuts or lots of other conservative economic policies. >> host: why are there so few working-class people in the congress historical the? >> guest: that is the million-dollar question. politicians aren't incredibly rare. in this book that is important. the obvious follow-up is if it is so important there aren't people in political office but is keeping them out in the first place? that's a question where political science still has some room for research. we cannot say definitively what is keeping working class people out of the political office. in a white collar government i try to roll out a couple explanations or test a couple popular explanations. if you were to ask somebody on the street why do you think there are working class people in the political office you are

often going to get one of two different types of answers. one answer by year when i talk to people about this research is are there for many people in the political office because that is what the voters want. this is a democracy and if people aren't getting the congress, it's because they are not winning the elections so this is about the voters preferring white-collar professionals. and the other argument is there are not very many qualified working class people out there. if they had what it takes politically that would be great but there aren't very many blue-collar workers with this sort of qualification of the skills that you need to be a successful politician. in the book i take both of those arguments seriously and i looked at the data and i find that neither one really lines up with what we actually know about the u.s. politics. so the few politicians from the working class who do run for political office tend to about as well as the politicians who

come from sort of white collar professions and i talked about in the book some of their research by a friend of mine and what she has done is she has been a national representative survey where she has given voters a hypothetical candidate and randomly varied captivating the same, the whole biography is the same except she changes the candy from a white collar professionals to a blue-collar worker but everything else is the same. she finds the same thing i do which is the voters seem to like the candidates in the working-class just fine. there doesn't seem to be this huge dropoff that you would expect. voters seem perfectly willing to cast their ballots for the workers. what's the problem? it's not that the blue-collar workers are running and voters are sending them packing its that they are not running in the first place so if you took my balad from north carolina in 2012 actually went through the top of the ballot and looked at

every single politician, for every office down to the general assembly in the state legislature and there wasn't a single person out of 30 or 35 candidates there wasn't a single person that was from a working-class occupation and it's not the working class people that were running and losing its the working-class people that aren't running in the first place. >> there just aren't very many qualified working-class people. >> what i try to do is just what -- and it's hard to know who is qualified to. but we do have the national or systematic data on who is interested in politics, who feels like they can make a difference in politics. when you look at the data there or not these huge gaps between the working class and everybody

else. the statistic that i often talk about is if even half of a percent of the working-class americans have what it takes or have the qualifications to be politicians if even half of the working-class people were qualified that would be enough people to fill what every seat in congress and every state legislature 40 times over with the enough qualified blue-collar workers left over to fill in a few city councils. this is a big country and the idea that there are not qualified blue-collar workers out there just doesn't add up. >> one thing that occurred to me is one is a very practical thing like they are working a lot of hours and they don't really have time and i guess the other thing is related to education and maybe you do get into this and lack of confidence and they just didn't think it was something that they could do.

>> guest: we need to do more hard research on this but it's not so much a lack of qualifications. it's discouraging circumstances like the high cost of running a campaign, the practical disruptions associated with running an office. my hunch and with the data is starting to show all the way this preliminary is that they are being screened out by the sort of practical hurdles that are in front of anyone that wants to run for the bill of office. i should mention running for office isn't easy for anyone who does it, but i think that's probably a much more important part of the explanation than if we just thought they are sending them home or working class people just don't have what it takes. i can't say definitively what's keeping people out of the political office but i think that going forward we can take those explanations of the table i don't think we would get very far in explaining why we have a

white collar government if we get hung up on these ideas that people are no good or the voters don't like them. >> host: so they are just as likely to win but when they are in the congress and we talked about this a little earlier they work harder in terms of the number of co-sponsors but they don't get to pass as many bills and you may be need this in the book but that's because the congress itself isn't representative of the public at large in terms of working-class verses millionaires and other non-working-class people? >> guest: that's one possibility if you are a blue-collar worker and get into the congress and state legislature and you propose a bill that you know from your own experience and is really important for working-class people. it's going to get harder to get traction for that legislation if everyone around you is from the white-collar professions.

that is definitely one possible explanation for that finding. >> host: there is this tipping point where there are so many better community heads and there was a lot of - the 90's and i don't know if it has reached a peak in their power seems to be more than the numbers would suggest. can you talk about a tipping point for the working class because it is such a small percentage. >> this is sort of the challenge. so in the 70's and 80's there was an early line of research on the shortage of the women in the political office and how that affected public policy. with that research found is once you got a critical mass of the women in the legislature then you started to see the policy change. more sort of passing but it

wasn't just a linear relationship and one female legislator and get a little bit more to the it was really the strength in numbers kind of situation. my guess is that you would see something similar in the working-class people if adding one or two people to congress might affect public policy. adding 50 would probably affect public policy a lot more. so why do think there is a sort of strength in numbers and as you mentioned it is important for people to eventually reach the sort of high ranking leadership positions and that just takes time and experience. >> host: there are more members and i guess more so on the city level. were you able to find any kind of a tipping point and can you just talk about some of the differences between the local city council verses the

congress? >> guest: it is challenging to make the connections that in the state legislature in congress because they are sort of fundamentally different policymaking environment but they do have a lot of things in common and a lot of times they are dealing with similar kinds of problems and so in the book i look across different states and cities and the way of supplementing or beefing up my analysis in congress i say okay if it really is the case that it matters that there are no working-class members of congress, then in the state legislatures where there are some working-class people or city councils where we do see some cities that have a majority working-class city council we should see policy outcomes changing more different policy outcomes in the states or cities where there are lots of working-class people in the political institutions and that's exactly what i see.

one analysis in the book i look at what percentage of the city's budget it devotes to social welfare, safety net programs and just like you would expect based on what you've seen at the congressional level cities that have more working class people tend to spend a slightly higher percentage of their budget on the social safety net programs than the towns and cities that are run completely white collar professionals. it's hard to say there's an exact to pinpoint just because we don't see hundreds of thousands of cities even at the city level there's a severe shortage of politicians in a working-class but i think the important, not part of the book is we do see what you would expect which is when you add more working-class people to the legislature in this case the city council, the policy does move in a sort of more pro worker direction or towards the outcomes of the working class

people. >> was there a period there was a peak? i know it's pretty stable over time but during the 70's, during the civil rights movement -- >> guest: this is the interesting thing that the congressional level there is essentially no change. but i like to see is you can't fall off the floor. converse had no working-class people. every congress had less than 2% working class people. but if you go to the state level you see declines just in the last 30 or 40 years of 1976 the typical state legislature was about 5% working class. fast forward to today and it is more like two or 3% working class. so i think what that tells us is, you know, if anything it is getting harder.

unions are declining so i can't tell you there is a high water mark and in the data that we have below the federal level doesn't go back very far. but i cannot tell you is if there is a trend, it is downward and it's getting harder for people to get into office so this isn't a problem that is going to solve itself this isn't a phenomena that is going to go away on its own. >> host: most people are aware that they have been declining. are there other groups that would take this role? you give the example to go out there and we have heard from people in the working class. who else would it be? >> guest: this is what is exciting me about this line of research is there are programs on the ground right now that are

designed to recruit, train and support the candidates in the working-class. right now the ones i know about oral union base so the most prominent example is the afl-cio in new jersey. one is the labor candidate school where they recruit and train. they are graduates of over 700 elections in every level of government and the new jersey from the most local of to the state legislature. so there is a model that works and it doesn't seem to be very expensive to sort of get high-quality candidates in the working class to have a sort of successful political career. the question right now is can that model travel to a place where unions aren't as strong as they are in new jersey so could you have a labour candidate school for working-class people

and the right to work state in the state where unions, there are not as many union members and where they have sort of less institutional power. and to me i don't see any reason why you couldn't -- there are lots of progressive grass-roots organizations in every state that care about working people even states where the environment is hostile to the unions they are organizations that stand up for the little guy and those are the organizations that might have the potential to sort of take up this challenge of supporting the candidates in the working-class even in places where the unions aren't doing that work right now. >> host: you talk about controlling the party. this almost seems to me like a mantra for the democratic party to bring out people who might vote progressive.

a lot of the ways that you define working for the little guy or democratic policies. can you talk about the role of the party and what can republicans learn from the research? >> guest: let's just take democrats out of the picture for a minute and look at republicans nationwide. within the republican party among the ordinary citizens there are important francis between the republicans and working-class jobs or white collar jobs. and it is the case that you see the same thing among the politicians. a member of congress, republican in congress from the working class is going to be little less for to divide than a republican in congress from white-collar jobs and so this stuff that i'm describing in this book really isn't limited to one party. there is of course a huge difference between republicans and democrats in congress but within each party there are important francis in the perspective that the republican

a working-class job brings and that republican is going to be closer to the working class republicans than the republican who did only white collar jobs. and so, the message here is and really, you know, the message here isn't democrats are the only people who should care about this. these are important conditions that both parties really have -- it really involves and affects both political parties to beat the average democrat in congress -- the average republican spent about 1% of their career doing working-class jobs. the average democrat spend about 2%. so this isn't an issue that one party sort of loans. >> we haven't talked about it and i know you talk about it in the book but again you control for it. like ethnicity there is a lot of talk about the hispanic population and how it is

increasing and republicans need to get on board with that. it seems to me those people are probably in the work to made a lot of those people like immigrants are in the working class. could that be an area -- have you thought about how the ethnicity fits into the working class remark that you talked about? >> guest: i take the race and the gender and the party seriously that they are sort of background characters in the sense that i'm controlling for them and making sure to account for them and the statistical work that i do but i am really focusing on the differences by social class and that is in part because political scientists have done already a good job of exploring the differences between republicans and democrats in congress or between men and women in congress or

between the legislators in different races and ethnic backgrounds. and so in the book what is new about this book there's never been a study that looked up the differences between politicians from different social classes and in a systematic way using the sort of hard data so that's why in these questions you have does it matter there are so few women in congress, does it matter that congress is so much wider than the country as a whole these are important questions in this book i try to focus on the question that we have paid less attention to which is does it matter there are so few working-class people. >> host: we have maybe one minute left. i want to ask about the tea party. the research in san 20 await but it seems to me like there is a lot