Replication Data for: 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. All the analyses were done on Stata 18.5, Revision 26 Feb 2025. The archive includes the following files: ------- Code: ------- analysis-paper.do - do-file that replicates all the analyses in the paper analysis-appendix.do - do-file that replicates all the analyses (except Figure A1) in the appendix ------- Data: ------- conjoint-exp-data.dta - data from the conjoint experiment us-conjoint-exp-data.dta - data from the conjoint experiment in the US info-exp-data.dta - data from the information experiment demographics-data.dta - respondent socio-demographic characteristics conjoint-weights-US - weights for adjusting conjoint attribute distributions in the US TASS survey raked-ps-weights.dts - raked post-stratification weights in non-US samples ------- Notes: ------- Download the archive onto a hard drive, open the do-files directly from it. There are several user-written packages used in the analyses. Do-files contain the lists and instructions for how to download them.