Democracy, Inequality, and Representation in Comparative Perspective

9. Income, Inequality, and Electoral Participation

Chapter 9 Income, Inequality, and Electoral Participation CHRISTOPHER J. ANDERSON AND PABLO BERAMENDI The supposition that material welfare influences whether and how citizens participate in democratic politics has a long and rich tradition in the social sciences. Moreover, the notion that income and income inequality matter to democratic processes and the quality of democratic outcomes is widely accepted. Yet, while scholars have vigorously investigated the impact on participation of citizens’ resources in terms of social status, education , and levels of income, the issue of how relative income at the individual level and income inequality at the macro level affect civic participation has received relatively little attention from social scientists. This relative lack of attention by scholars to the question of how income inequality cross-nationally and differences in income at the level of individual citizens affect civic life is surprising given the normative importance attached to inequality’s effects on democracy. After all, it has long been argued that economic inequality leads to inferior democratic outcomes because it concentrates power among a smaller group of people and increases politicians’ responsiveness to an ever-smaller group of advantaged citizens (Bartels 2002; Dahl 1971; Pateman 1971; Schattschneider 1960). To help develop a better understanding of the connection between economic and political inequality we therefore examine the impact of individuals’ location within a country’s income distribution (relative income) and cross-national differences in income distributions (inequality) on people’s propensity to vote. Based on individual and macrolevel data collected in eighteen OECD democracies, we find that income significantly affects electoral participation . At the level of individual citizens, we find that the effects of income differentials are essentially linear, such that individuals who are below the median income in society are less likely to participate in elections, while those above the median income are more likely to do so. Moreover , our results show that the effect of income on electoral participation increases monotonically. We also find that income inequality increases electoral abstention across advanced democracies. Moreover, our analyses reveal not only that overall income inequality affects people at different ends of the income distribution similarly, but that greater inequality at either the upper or lower end of the income distribution has equally deleterious effects on electoral participation. Thus, our analyses show that income inequality— regardless of its specific shape—reduces electoral participation and that it does so for all kinds of individuals. However, we also argue that the mechanism by which inequality affects participation is likely to differ between high- and low-income individuals: while inequality at the lower end reduces participation among low-income individuals because it deprives them of resources, higher inequalities at the upper end reduce participation by creating disincentives for the very rich to get involved. In this chapter, we first explore the logic of how income and income inequality affect democratic representation and civic behavior. We then develop a model of income and political action that we subsequently test with data from eighteen OECD countries. We conclude with a discussion of a possible research agenda linking income inequality and the quality of civic involvement that would bring insights from political economy and political psychology to bear on the study of citizen behavior. Absolute Income and Electoral Participation Students of mass political behavior have long argued that a country’s economic conditions affect people’s beliefs about whether government is legitimate and effective as well as citizens’ propensity to be involved in the political process. In fact, a sizable literature has investigated the link between economic conditions and turnout at the macro level (for an excellent review, see Radcliff 1992). Painting with a broad brush, we note that the empirical findings from this research point in several directions. First, they indicate that the impact of macroeconomic fluctuations on turnout, in terms of both size of impact and direction, differs between the developed and the developing world. While a bad economy depresses turnout in the industrialized societies, it increases turnout in the less industrialized ones (Aguilar and Pacek 2000; Bahry and Lipsmeyer 2001; Radcliff 1992). Second, the impact of the business cycle on turnout is more pronounced in countries with less generous welfare states (Pacek and Radcliff 1995; Radcliff 1992). Income, Inequality, and Electoral Participation 279 Related but much less extensive strands of research have examined the impact of economic conditions on other forms of participation and citizen involvement, finding that a good economy generally fosters more involvement...