Abstract
Socioeconomic resources are important predictors of electoral participation, yet to understand their impact, we argue it is essential to examine the interaction of income dissatisfaction (egocentric dimension) with someone’s view of societal conditions (sociotropic dimension). Drawing on pooled national election surveys, we find that deprivation indeed depresses voting, but more importantly also that there is significant variation among those who experience economic difficulties: those who disconnect their personal misfortune from broader grievances are significantly more likely to abstain (Relative Power Hypothesis), while embedding one’s situation in a context of societal disparities leads to a desire for change and participation levels nearly as high as among the better off (Conflict Hypothesis). Our findings speak to inequality and turnout research but also have direct political implications, as it seems that responsiveness to campaigns focused on distributional injustices hinges on voters’ perception of themselves in relation to society.
Highlights
Democracies entitle their citizens to vote in elections, yet not everyone exercises this right
Systematic abstention of disadvantaged and lower income groups is inherently problematic for the legitimacy of democratic decision-making in liberal democracies (Brady et al, 1995; Cheibub, 2007; Schumpeter, 2010; Wattenberg, 2002)
In Austria, as in many other Western European democracies, turnout is marked by an income gap: participation is generally higher in higher income groups and, at least on average, lower among the poor (Huijsmans et al, 2020; Matsubayashi and Sakaiya, 2021)
Summary
Democracies entitle their citizens to vote in elections, yet not everyone exercises this right. This conservative reaction to uncertainty and potential changes to the status quo is what prevents citizens from turning out, even though from a perspective of utility maximization, we would expect them to hope to improve their living conditions by taking part in elections: “People will defend and justify the social system in response to threat by using stereotypes to differentiate between high- and low-status groups to a greater degree than when there is no threat” (Jost et al, 2004) Evidence regarding this social-psychological mechanism and the effect of deprivation on electoral participation has resulted in mixed findings and for the most part utilized context-level data, leaving the exact individual-level mechanisms that are at play, in the dark. For a summary of descriptive statistics regarding our dependent and independent variables, see Table A1 in the Online Appendix
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