A politikai részvétel egyenlőtlenségei Európában

Abstract

Politicalinequalityisoneofthemostintensivelydiscussedtopicsinthefieldofpoliticalsociology. Based on the theories about democracy and according to contemporary political philosophers, modern democracy requires equality in political participation. My dissertation follows Jan Teorell’s (2006, 2007b) theoretical distinction between outcome-oriented and procedural inequalities in politicalparticipation. Outcome-oriented inequality is defined as distorted distribution of participants between social groups. On the other hand procedural inequalities mean "the causal roots of group based inequalities", or with other words the variation of mechanisms bring about participation. After the theoretical parts of my doctoral work, firstly I focus on the methodology of measuring outcome-oriented political inequalities, then I describe the inequalities in 22 European countries. Finally, I analyze the procedural inequalities in demonstrations with multilevel logistic regression models. The most important results of my doctoral work are: 1. I summarize research about the measurement of outcome-oriented inequalities. I define the criteria for developing an unbiased measurement of inequalities. Results of data simulations show that former indices are highly biased. My methodological innovation is the adaptedand corrected EGINI index (suggested by Hu (2015)), that makes comparative analyses possible. 2. According to the empirical results, in most of the countries inequalities in voting are significantly lower than inequalities regarding the extra-parliamentary forms of participation (boycotting, signing petition, demonstrating). In the case of demonstrations, I measured the largest inequalities in the educational dimension, which is followed by age, type of locality, and gender respectively. 3. Analyzing the procedural inequalities, results of the multilevel regression models fit well to the micro theories about political participation and mobilization, but the results extend the theories invarious ways. There are differences between countries and social groups regarding the correlations between individual factors (e.g. dissatisfaction, political efficacy, and interest in politics) and participation in demonstrations. I made the conclusion that mechanisms explaining political participation are not universal but contingent on the social environment. 4. Finally, on the basis of these new empirical results I suggest new hypotheses and research questions about the macro conditions and the explanation of inequalities in political participation.