Fred DeVeaux

I'm a PhD candidate at UCLA studying American politics and political methodology with a focus on elections, representation, and class. I study how politicians' class backgrounds influence their election campaigns and behavior in office. I combine original data on the occupational backgrounds of congressional candidates from their campaign websites with modern empirical techniques for causal inference and recent advances in computational text analysis. I am currently on the job market.

CV

Research

• Do Working-Class Candidates Activate Class-Based Voting?
  With Jared Abbott. Electoral Studies, 2024. [Replication materials]
  Abstract

  After steadily leaving the Democratic Party, working-class voters are increasingly seen as pivotal in US elections. What type of candidates should parties nominate to win over working-class voters? Parties often nominate candidates based on characteristics they think will appeal to certain groups of voters. These typically include campaign messages, such as policy positions or rhetoric, but can also include descriptive characteristics. In this paper we use a conjoint experiment to test whether candidates’ class background can activate class-based voting. Overall, we find that a candidate’s occupation has a substantial effect on voter perceptions: working-class respondents are 6.4 percentage points more likely to prefer a candidate with a working-class occupation over one with an upper-class occupation. This effect is not driven by inferences that respondents make about candidates’ policy positions or group-based rhetoric. Instead, we find that working-class voters perceive working-class candidates as more understanding of their problems. Our results suggest that candidates’ class background is an underappreciated yet effective mechanism for activating class-based voting.

• What Happens When Working-Class Candidates Run For Office?
  With Jared Abbott. Revise & Resubmit
  Abstract

  Working-class Americans are significantly underrepresented in politics. It is unclear whether this is due to electoral disadvantages or pre-election barriers to entry. To address this question, we collect the full occupational histories from campaign websites for all 8,775 candidates who finished first or second in congressional primaries between 2010 and 2024. Using a difference-in-differences design, we find that when a party nominates a working-class candidate to the general election, it sees a modest decrease of about 0.6 percentage points in its two-party vote share, though the effect is too small to alter more than a few electoral outcomes. However, parity in electoral outcomes does not mean working-class candidates face no disadvantage. We find that they are more ideologically left-wing than their peers, lack elite credentials associated with higher vote shares, raise a smaller share of campaign donations, and attract less support from non-working-class voters. Our findings suggest that while general elections do not filter out working-class candidates, they nonetheless face structural disadvantages that they must overcome to achieve electoral parity.

• Do Legislators’ Occupations Influence Their Behavior in Office?
  Work in Progress
  Abstract

  Compared to the population at large, the US Congress has relatively few workers and tradespeople and many lawyers and business executives. This raises concerns about unequal representation for Americans from different occupations. Yet it remains unclear how legislators’ prior careers shape their behavior in office, if at all. Party discipline, constituency demands, and electoral accountability dominate legislative behavior and could leave little room for career background to matter. And if it does, it might operate through two distinct channels: as a source of expertise, shaping which issues legislators focus on, or as a source of ideology, shaping how they vote. I compile occupational histories for all 3,669 members of Congress from 1947 to 2024 and link them to 3.9 million floor speeches, 130,000 sponsored bills, and interest group ratings spanning eight decades. Using a difference-in-differences design, I find that occupation predicts both. When a district elects a representative from a given occupation, the share of speeches and bills on related topics each increase by 27\%, and legislators are 21\% more effective at advancing legislation in their occupational domain. Occupation also predicts ideology along class lines: legislators with business backgrounds vote more conservatively across a wide range of issues, while those with blue-collar or education backgrounds vote less conservatively. The occupational composition of Congress shapes both which issues receive attention and whose economic interests are represented.

• Anti-Establishment Rhetoric in Congressional Campaigns
  With Jared Abbott. Work in Progress
  Abstract

  The past decade has witnessed a sharp rise in anti-establishment politics in the United States, but its origins remain poorly understood. Is anti-establishment sentiment primarily an ideological phenomenon of the far right and far left, or does it represent an independent dimension of political conflict? Does it emerge through the entry of new outsider candidates, or through adaptation by established politicians to changing voter demands? To address these questions, we construct a new dataset of more than 12,000 congressional candidates running in primary and general elections between 2010 and 2024, drawing on over one million sentences scraped from their campaign websites. Using large language models and supervised machine learning, we classify the degree of anti-establishment rhetoric in each candidate’s platform. We then examine how the prevalence of anti-establishment appeals has evolved over time and the extent to which it reflects candidates’ ideological positions, occupational and socioeconomic backgrounds, district characteristics, or strategic responses to challengers. This approach provides the first systematic portrait of the rise of anti-establishment rhetoric in U.S. congressional elections and the types of candidates and contexts in which it emerges.

Teaching

• PS40: Intro to American Politics (2022, 2023, 2024). Teaching Assistant
• PS167: Political Economy of Development. Teaching Assistant
• PS116: Marxism. Teaching Assistant

Contact

Email: fdeveaux@ucla.edu