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Abstract
Systematic differences in voter turnout limit the capacity of public institutions to address the needs of under-represented groups. One critical question relates to the role of health as a mechanism driving these inequalities. This study explores the associations of self-rated health (SRH) and limitations in everyday activities with voting over the course of adulthood in the 1958 National Child Development Study and the 1970 British Cohort Study. We used data from participants who reported voting in the last general election at least once between the ages of 23 and 55 in the 1958 cohort and between the ages of 30 and 42 in the 1970 cohort. We examined associations controlling for a range of early-life and adult circumstances using random-effects models. Compared with those in good or better health: those in fair health had 15% and 18% lower odds of voting in the 1958 and 1970 cohorts; those in poor or worse health had 17% and 32% lower odds of voting in the 1958 and 1970 cohorts. These effects varied with age and were most marked among those in poor health at the ages of 23/30 in the 1958 and 1970 cohorts. Controlling for SRH, having limitations in everyday activities was not associated with voting in main models. Examining age-based differences, however, we found that reporting limitations was associated with a higher probability of voting at the age of 55 in the 1958 cohort and at the age of 30 in the 1970 cohort. Building on the qualities of the British birth cohorts, we offer nuanced evidence about the role of health on voting, which involves considerable life-course processes. Future studies need to examine how these findings progress after the age of 55, extend to mental wellbeing and health practices, and contribute to explain social inequalities in voter turnout.
Highlights
One key characteristic of modern democratic societies lies in the capacity of its citizens to influence politics through voting in events such as general elections
The current study examines the progression of the health-voting association using two British birth cohorts, the 1958 National Child Development Study (NCDS) and the 1970 British Cohort study (BCS), which have already been used to study the determinants of voter turnout (Denny & Doyle, 2005, 2007a, 2008; Deary, Batty, & Gale, 2008; Finlay & Flanagan, 2013; Persson, 2014)
The decrease in voting after the age of 42 in the 1958 cohort and the lower prevalence of voting in the 1970 cohort are likely to be explained by the historical drop in voter turnout around the 2001 United Kingdom (UK) general election (Dempsey & Loft, 2017)
Summary
One key characteristic of modern democratic societies lies in the capacity of its citizens to influence politics through voting in events such as general elections. The legitimacy of this process depends on the equal opportunity to vote across all groups, independent of age, gender, race/ ethnicity, family background, and other social characteristics. Gollust and Rahn (2015) argued that differences in voting attributable to health may translate into a loss of political power among the socially disadvantaged groups who are less capable to promote their health, thereby representing a new funda mental cause of health inequalities (Phelan, Link, & Tehranifar, 2010) A critical dimension of this debate concerns whether health represents a potential mechanism reinforcing social inequalities in voting over the life-course (Pacheco & Fletcher, 2014; Rodriguez, Geronimus, Bound, & Dorling, 2015). Gollust and Rahn (2015) argued that differences in voting attributable to health may translate into a loss of political power among the socially disadvantaged groups who are less capable to promote their health, thereby representing a new funda mental cause of health inequalities (Phelan, Link, & Tehranifar, 2010)
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