The Inequality of Participation: Re-examining the Role of Social Stratification and Post-Communism on Political Participation in Europe

Abstract

This article compares the determinants of political participation, from voting and signing petitions to boycotting, across 23 European coun- tries, posing the question whether and to what degree social inequalities in political participation differ between post-communist and Western countries. The data for the analysis is from the second round of the ESS survey, con- ducted in 2004-2005. The analysis focuses on the role of education, occupa- tion, and gender in shaping the chances of engaging in political action, while also controlling for a range of sociological, political, and demographic vari- ables. Interaction effects between individual variables and a post-communist dummy variable are used to directly compare the statistical signifi cance of the difference in coeffi cients between post-communist and Western countries. The article fi nds that the observed effects of the post-communist context are actually accounted for by the indirect effects of a number of individual-level variables. In particular, education, occupation, and gender have stronger ef- fects in post-communist countries than Western countries on many forms of political participation; in other words, the post-communist countries exhibit somewhat larger inequalities in political participation than in the West.