Democratic elections are notoriously complicated and noisy events about which it can be difficult to generalize. It is nonetheless important to develop theories that isolate particular aspects of electoral processes, and the goal of this chapter is to begin laying the groundwork for a theory that can describe how class and ethnic identities can influence electoral competition. The argument is based on the assumption that voters care only about maximizing their share of the “government pie,” and voters and candidates invoke “class” and “ethnic” identities instrumentally to this end. Although no one should deny that material considerations are important in elections, it should also go without saying that this assumption does not come close to fully describing the ways that voters and parties behave, or the role that class and ethnicity play in social interactions. The goal is simply to see if the assumption can aid the development of useful intuitions. To this end, I focus in particular on how social structure can impose limits on the types of promises that parties can make to voters motivated by material concerns.

The chapter is organized as follows. The next section reviews the basic distributive politics model of elections and describes its limitations for generating intuitions about electoral politics. Section 3.2 then describes why it makes sense to consider how class and ethnicity can be used to make credible distributive promises to voters. Using the assumption that class and ethnicity constrain party promises, Section 3.3 explains how social structure – the distribution of voter incomes and ethnic identities – can shape which types of parties should be advantaged in electoral competition. The framework, however, raises important questions about the formation of party systems and the nature of party promises to voters. If social structure, for example, creates advantages for particular types of parties, why do parties that are not advantaged bother to form? And what types of platforms should advantaged parties offer to voters? I address such questions in Chapter 4, when I develop an explicit argument linking social structure to party competition.