participatory inequality
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2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrik Serup Christensen ◽  
Janette Huttunen ◽  
Fredrik Malmberg ◽  
Nanuli Silagadze

Democratic theorists have long emphasized the importance of participatory equality, i.e. that all citizens should have an equal right to participate. It is still unclear, however, whether ordinary citizens view this principle as central to democracy and how different violations of this principle affect subjective democratic legitimacy. The attitudes of citizens are imperative when it comes to the subjective legitimacy of democratic systems, and it is therefore important to examine how participatory inequalities affect these attitudes. We here contribute to this research agenda with survey experiments embedded in two surveys (n=324, n=840). We here examine 1) whether citizens consider participatory inequality to be an important democratic principle, and 2) how gender and educational inequalities affect subjective legitimacy and the perceived usefulness of the participatory input. The results show that citizens generally consider participatory inequalities to be important, but only gender inequalities affect subjective legitimacy and usefulness. Hence it is important to consider the type of inequality to understand the implications.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Constantin Manuel Bosancianu ◽  
Carsten Q. Schneider

Poorer citizens generally participate less in politics; at the same time, the income-based gap in participation is not the same across democracies. Whereas in Denmark in 1977 turnout among poorer citizens was 6 percentage points higher than among wealthier ones, in the United States in 1988 the gap is reversed: turnout among wealthier Americans is 31 percentage points higher than among their poorer peers. Existing attempts at understanding the sources of this variation point to macro-level factors, such as compulsory voting, ballot complexity, or income inequality (Gallego, 2015; Solt, 2008). Though important, we argue that existing accounts aren't successful in explaining temporal variation in this participation gap, over periods of time in which the institutional framework is stable. We propose instead a largely neglected, yet plausible, reason for why a differential effect of income on political participation exists: the characteristics of the welfare state. In addition to providing resources relevant to participation, welfare state arrangements also create political constituencies that can be mobilized around a shared goal by political entrepreneurs. Building on Schneider and Makszin's (2014) education-based analysis we inductively develop, with the use of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), various welfare regime types that condition patterns of income-based participatory inequality in democracies. These are produced based on an original data set of roughly 150 merged surveys from 19 OECD members, between 1960 and 2010. We label these types the supportive and mobilizing welfare regimes, along with their non-mobilizing and non-supportive counterparts. These welfare state regimes correspond to different mechanisms through which welfare state characteristics shape participatory patterns: (1) resource endowments available to individuals for participation and (2) unions' and parties' ability to politically mobilize and inform their members. We complement our aggregate-level QCA analysis with individual-level tests of these hypothesized mechanisms. Relying on six cross-national survey programs, such as the European Social Survey or the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we find consistent support for the mobilization-based mechanisms, while revealing mixed evidence that they also spill over into attitudinal factors which underpin participation. Only weaker evidence is found for our resource-based mechanisms. Overall, our results indicate the effect of welfare state characteristics on political participation gaps in advanced industrial democracies. Welfare state reforms, and in particular retrenchment, are likely to have (damaging) consequences for democracy.


2018 ◽  
Vol 83 (5) ◽  
pp. 869-896 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Desmond ◽  
Adam Travis

Combining ethnographic and statistical methods, this study identifies interlocking mechanisms that help explain how disadvantaged neighborhoods influence their residents’ political capacity. Support systems that arise in low-income neighborhoods promote social interaction that helps people make ends meet, but these systems also expose residents to heavy doses of adversity, which dampens perceptions of collective political capacity. For the poorest residents of these neighborhoods in particular, the expected positive effect of informal social support is suppressed by the negative effect of perceived trauma. These findings present a micro-level account of poverty, social interaction, and political capacity, one that holds implications for scholarship and public policy on participatory inequality.


2014 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 437-462 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carsten Q. Schneider ◽  
Kristin Makszin

Author(s):  
Kay Lehman Schlozman ◽  
Sidney Verba ◽  
Henry E. Brady

This chapter looks at the potentially democratizing impact of the Internet on political participation, and asks both individuals and organizations the same kinds of questions already posed earlier regarding whether processes of political recruitment can alter familiar participatory patterns. If the Internet is bringing new people and new organizations into politics, the chapter considers if it is bringing new kinds of people and new kinds of interests into political activity. Furthermore, even if the Internet is effective in generating additional political activity, the chapter considers if this new activity is simply replicating the same participatory inequalities that have emerged over and over in this volume.


Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (4) ◽  
pp. 121-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kay Lehman Schlozman ◽  
Sidney Verba ◽  
Henry E. Brady

Using an August 2008 representative survey of Americans conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, we investigate the consequences of Internet-based political activity for long-standing patterns of participatory inequality. There is little evidence of change in the extent to which political participation is stratified by socioeconomic status, even when we account for the fact that the well educated and affluent are more likely to be Internet users. However, because young adults are much more likely than their elders to be comfortable with electronic technologies and to use the Internet, the Web has ameliorated the well-known participatory deficit among those who have recently joined the electorate. Still, among Internet users, the young are not especially politically active. How these trends play out in the future depends on what happens to the current Web-savvy younger generation and the cohorts that follow as well as on the rapidly developing political capacities of the Web.


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