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. Yet it remains unclear whether elections contribute to this underrepresentation, and if so, at which stage. To address this question, we collect the full occupational histories of over 8,000 congressional candidates who ran in contested primaries or general elections between 2010 and 2024. Comparing candidates under similar electoral conditions, we find that working-class candidates perform substantially worse in primaries but nearly as well as other candidates in general elections. In primaries, working-class candidates receive about 3 percentage points less vote share and are 7 percentage points less likely to win, whereas parties nominating working-class candidates receive only 0.6 percentage points less general-election vote share, with no detectable effect on victory. To explain this difference, we compare working-class and non-working-class candidates across election stages. Working-class general-election nominees remain less likely to hold elite credentials, raise less money, and receive relatively greater support from working-class than upper-middle-class voters. Because these differences persist after nomination, the absence of a meaningful general-election penalty is difficult to attribute to a screening account in which primaries select only working-class candidates who resemble other nominees. Instead, the pattern is consistent with party labels attenuating the electoral consequences of class-based disadvantages in general elections.

• Do Legislators’ Occupations Predict Their Behavior in Office?
  Under Review
  Abstract

  Compared to the population at large, Congress has few workers and tradespeo- ple and many lawyers and business executives. This raises concerns about unequal representation. Yet it remains unclear how much legislators’ prior careers predict behavior in office, and whether differences appear mainly in the issues they work on, the positions they take, or both. I compile occupational histories for 3,600 members of Congress, 1947–2024. Comparing same-party legislators representing the same dis- trict over time, I find that legislators focus more on issues connected to their prior oc- cupations in speeches and sponsored bills, serve on relevant committees, and advance occupation-related legislation more effectively. But they do not vote differently on issues related to their occupation than on other issues. Instead, occupation predicts voting along traditional class lines, especially between business- and working-class legislators on employment and labor. Congress’s occupational composition therefore shapes which issues receive attention and whose economic interests are represented.

• Occupational Donor Networks in Congressional Elections
  Work in Progress
  Abstract

  Members of Congress are drawn from a narrow set of occupations whose members are also major sources of campaign money. How much do occupational donor networks shape fundraising in congressional elections? I assemble occupational histories for 9,100 candidates for U.S. Congress between 2010 and 2024, and classify the self-reported occupations of more than 14 million unique individual donors who contributed $14.4 billion to federal House and Senate campaigns. I find that candidates capture a larger share of contributions from donors who share their occupation than from other donors. These occupational donor networks operate in both general and primary elections, but are stronger in primaries. They vary both in the share of each occupation's donor pool that candidates capture and in the size of the donor pool itself. As a result, candidates from elite professional occupations gain tens of thousands of dollars from donors who share their occupation, while candidates from working-class occupations gain little. Occupational donor networks therefore provide the greatest fundraising advantages to candidates from occupations already overrepresented in Congress.

• The Supply and Demand of Anti-Elite Rhetoric in Congressional Campaigns
  With Jared Abbott. Work in Progress
  Abstract

  Populism’s electoral success has drawn attention to anti-elite rhetoric, one of its defining features. What structures the supply of and demand for this rhetoric in U.S. congressional campaigns? To answer this question, we provide the first systematic account of candidate-level supply by classifying website text from more than 10,000 congressional candidacies from 2010 to 2024. First, we find that anti-elite rhetoric has not noticeably increased over time; challengers and candidates without political experience use more, while elite targets differ by party. Observationally, candidates using more anti-elite rhetoric perform worse in primaries but similarly in general elections. Because anti-elite rhetoric claims to speak for ordinary people against powerful elites, we next ask whether class structures both supply and demand. We find class differences in supply: working-class candidates use more, while business executives use less. Anti-elite candidate types also gain support from less elite coalitions: they raise more from small-donors, less from large-donor, and gain relatively more support from noncollege than college voters. To isolate demand, we field a preregistered conjoint with more than 40,000 respondents choosing between Democratic and Republican candidates. We find no average advantage for candidates using anti-elite rather than people-centric rhetoric, and no reliable differences by respondent class, anti-elite attitudes, or economic grievance. Taken together, class structures the supply of anti-elite rhetoric and the observed coalitions surrounding its users, but respondent class does not reliably structure demand for the rhetoric itself.

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