Conjugacy in Permutation Representations of the Symmetric Group

Although the conjugacy classes of the general linear group are known, it is not obvious (from the canonic form of matrices) that two permutation matrices are similar if and only if they are conjugate as permutations in the symmetric group, i.e. that conjugacy classes of S_n do not unite under the natural representation. We prove this fact, and give its application to the enumeration of fixed points under a natural action of S_n x S_n. We also consider the permutation representations of S_n which arise from the action of S_n on k-tuples, and classify which of them unite conjugacy classes and which do not.