Participatory Inequality Research Articles

Worn Out & Tuned Out: Does Politics Fatigue on Social Media Foster Participatory Inequality Among Americans?

ABSTRACT In this paper, we take seriously evidence of growing politics fatigue on social media among Americans and consider how this fatigue might ultimately foster participatory inequalities on these platforms. We test two theoretical accounts of how social media (SM) politics fatigue is produced among those who (a) are disinterested in politics altogether (interest-based fatigue) or (b) hold strong political identities (identity-based fatigue). Analyses of two survey datasets collected during the 2020 U.S. election period (Ns = 7,342; 1,190) confirm that the cause of SM politics fatigue is unlikely to be simply a result of increased exposure to politics on social media. Analysis of one dataset provided evidence of interest-based, but not identity-based fatigue—respondents low in political interest experience greater politics fatigue when they encounter higher levels of politics on social media. Further, we find that increased politics fatigue is associated with (a) more negative perceptions of social media, and (b) lower levels of engagement on social media (mixed evidence). In discussing these findings, we consider how abundant opportunities to encounter and engage in politics on social media may produce politics fatigue among those who may most benefit from such opportunities.

Unequal inequalities? How participatory inequalities affect democratic legitimacy

AbstractDemocratic theorists have long emphasized the importance of participatory equality, that is, that all citizens should have an equal right to participate. It is still unclear, however, whether ordinary citizens view this principle as central to democracy and how different violations of this principle affect subjective democratic legitimacy. The attitudes of citizens are imperative when it comes to the subjective legitimacy of democratic systems, and it is therefore important to examine how participatory inequalities affect these attitudes. We here contribute to this research agenda with survey experiments embedded in two surveys (n = 324, n = 840). We here examine (1) whether citizens consider participatory inequality to be an important democratic principle, and (2) how gender and educational inequalities affect subjective legitimacy and the perceived usefulness of the participatory input. The results show that citizens generally consider participatory inequalities to be important, but only gender inequalities affect subjective legitimacy and usefulness. Hence it is important to consider the type of inequality to understand the implications.

Participatory Inequality Across Countries: Contacting Public Officials Online and Offline.

The Internet offers low-cost ways to participate in political life, which reduces the motivation required to participate and thus potentially reduces inequalities in participation. I examine online and offline contacting of elected officials using original survey data from Canada, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States collected in 2019 and 2021. Education is a consistent positive predictor of contacting in all countries as well as both modes of contact (online and offline). Income differences are small. Younger people are more likely to contact officials, online and offline, compared to older people. Females are less likely to contact officials, online and offline, compared to males. While political interest, efficacy, online information consumption, and online group ties are believed to lead to more equity in online communication, I do not see strong differences in these variables for online and offline contacting. I conclude by discussing the implications of exclusively online contacting of officials when this form of contact is devalued by elected officials, as well as the implications of participatory inequalities with respect to influencing public policy and access to government services.

Income Changes Do Not Influence Political Participation: Evidence from Comparative Panel Data

The income gradient in political participation is a widely accepted stylized fact. This article asks how income effects on political involvement unfold over time. Using nine panel datasets from six countries, it analyzes whether income changes have short-term effects on political involvement, whether effects vary across the life-cycle, and whether parental income has an independent influence. Irrespective of indicator, specification, and method (hybrid models, inclusion of lags and leads, error-correction models), we find neither significant short-term effects of income changes nor life-cycle variation in these effects. However, parental income does seem to affect political socialization. Descriptive evidence and latent-growth-curve modeling based on household panels show that participatory inequality by parental income is already large before voting age. Poorer voters do not catch up with their richer peers in their twenties. This implies an urgent need for research on (political) inequality in youth and childhood.

When Time Is of the Essence: A Natural Experiment on How Time Constraints Influence Elections

Foundational theories of voter turnout suggest that time is a key input in the voting decision, but we possess little causal evidence about how this resource affects electoral behavior. In this article, we use over two decades of elections data and a novel geographic regression discontinuity design that leverages US time zone boundaries. Our results show that exogenous shifts in time allocations have significant political consequences. Namely, we find that citizens are less likely to vote if they live on the eastern side of a time zone border. Time zones also exacerbate participatory inequality and push election results toward Republicans. Exploring potential mechanisms, we find suggestive evidence that these effects are the consequence of insufficient sleep and moderated by the convenience of voting. Regardless of the exact mechanisms, our results indicate that local differences in daily schedules affect how difficult it is to vote and shape the composition of the electorate.

‘Don’t play if you can’t win’: does economic inequality undermine political equality?

AbstractIn this paper, we investigate whether income inequality negatively affects voter turnout. Despite some progress, the answer to this question is still debated due to methodological disagreements and differences in the selection of countries and time periods. We contribute to this debate by triangulating data and methods. More specifically, we use three kinds of data to resolve the question: first, we use cross-sectional aggregate data of 21 OECD countries in the time period from 1980 to 2014 to study the relationship between inequality and electoral participation. Second, we zoom in on the German case and examine local data from 402 administrative districts between 1998 and 2017. Focusing on within-country variation eliminates differences that are linked to features of the political system. Finally, we combine survey data with macro-data to investigate the impact of inequality on individual voting. This final step also allows us to test whether the effect of income inequality on voter turnout differs across income groups. Taken together, we offer the most comprehensive analysis of the impact of social inequality on political inequality to date. We corroborate accounts that argue that economic inequality exacerbates participatory inequality.

Political Consequences of Survival Strategies among the Urban Poor

Combining ethnographic and statistical methods, this study identifies interlocking mechanisms that help explain how disadvantaged neighborhoods influence their residents’ political capacity. Support systems that arise in low-income neighborhoods promote social interaction that helps people make ends meet, but these systems also expose residents to heavy doses of adversity, which dampens perceptions of collective political capacity. For the poorest residents of these neighborhoods in particular, the expected positive effect of informal social support is suppressed by the negative effect of perceived trauma. These findings present a micro-level account of poverty, social interaction, and political capacity, one that holds implications for scholarship and public policy on participatory inequality.

Participatory Inequality in Online and Offline Political Engagement in Thailand

Participatory Inequality in Online and Offline Political Engagement in Thailand

When You Don't Snooze, You Lose: A Natural Experiment on the Effect of Sleep Deprivation on Voter Turnout and Election Outcomes

In this article, we show that many citizens fail to vote because they are too tired. To do so, we leverage multiple approaches, including a unique natural quasi-experiment that exploits discontinuous decreases in sleep times on the eastern side of U.S. time zone boundaries. Our preferred model specification indicates that these exogenous decreases in sleep times depress county-level turnout in Congressional elections by about 2 percentage points. This effect is magnified in areas where obstacles to voting are greatest. Moreover, tiredness appears to exacerbate participatory inequality — depressing turnout in low propensity communities most — and push election outcomes towards Republicans. Supplementing this analysis, we conduct an observational study validating the direct relationship between tiredness and turnout. Our findings have important theoretical implications for the study of political participation. They suggest that many citizens hold the precursors to participation but lack the general, rather than expressly political, motivation to act on their intentions.

De lokale democratie en het probleem van participatieve ongelijkheid

Abstract Local democracy and the problem of participatory inequalityThe growing responsibilities of Dutch local governments for policy that was originally carried out by the national government raise the question to what extent local democracy is up to these tasks. Citizen participation is a central demand in any representative democracy. Participation ought to be not merely high, but also equal and non-selective, so that the voice of all societal groups is heard proportionally loud. This is particularly important when societal groups differ in their political preferences.This article studies the extent to which citizen participation in Dutch municipalities is indeed non-selective, by analyzing the first Dutch Local Election Survey 2016. It shows that not all citizens participate equally by casting their vote in local elections or via other local forms of participation. Particularly those groups that are underrepresented in political activities are more likely to support direct democracy in their municipality. The inequality in political participation along policy preferences cannot be reduced to demographic differences, implying that demographic representation is not the solution to participatory inequality.

Political participation, personality, and the conditional effect of campaign mobilization

Why are some people more responsive to campaign mobilization than others? I argue that the composition of a person's core personality makes some people more responsive to mobilization cues than others. However, the degree to which personality alters the effectiveness of mobilization also depends on the type of political participation for which people are being mobilized. I explore the determinants of political participation by looking at the interaction between the Big-5 traits of agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability and the intensity of campaign environments. This paper demonstrates that despite the possible ameliorative effect mobilization has on unequal patterns of political participation, an enduring source of participatory inequality may very well be rooted in a person's core psychological structure.

Forms of welfare capitalism and education-based participatory inequality

Forms of welfare capitalism and education-based participatory inequality

Who Speaks? Citizen Political Voice on the Internet Commons

Using an August 2008 representative survey of Americans conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, we investigate the consequences of Internet-based political activity for long-standing patterns of participatory inequality. There is little evidence of change in the extent to which political participation is stratified by socioeconomic status, even when we account for the fact that the well educated and affluent are more likely to be Internet users. However, because young adults are much more likely than their elders to be comfortable with electronic technologies and to use the Internet, the Web has ameliorated the well-known participatory deficit among those who have recently joined the electorate. Still, among Internet users, the young are not especially politically active. How these trends play out in the future depends on what happens to the current Web-savvy younger generation and the cohorts that follow as well as on the rapidly developing political capacities of the Web.

Weapon of the Strong? Participatory Inequality and the Internet

What is the impact of the possibility of political participation on the Internet on long-standing patterns of participatory inequality in American politics? An August 2008 representative survey of Americans conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project provides little evidence that there has been any change in the extent to which political participation is stratified by socio-economic status, but it suggests that the web has ameliorated the well-known participatory deficit among those who have just joined the electorate. Even when only that subset of the population with Internet access is considered, participatory acts such as contributing to candidates, contacting officials, signing a political petition, or communicating with political groups are as stratified socio-economically when done on the web as when done offline. The story is different for stratification by age where historically younger people have been less engaged than older people in most forms of political participation. Young adults are much more likely than their elders to be comfortable with electronic technologies and to use the Internet, but among Internet users, the young are not especially politically active. How these trends play out in the future depends on what happens to the current Web-savvy younger generation and the cohorts that follow and on the rapidly developing political capacities of the Web. Stay logged on …

From the Gap to the Chasm

This article focuses on gender and ethnic inequalities in political participation across non-Hispanic whites and Mexican Americans. Using a mainstream model of participation, the authors find that differences in the levels of resources, motivations, and opportunities effectively account for gender gaps within the two populations. However, this mainstream model leaves largely unexplained the chasm in participation across non-Hispanic whites and Mexican Americans. The authors incorporate socialization experiences specific to Mexican Americans to identify the roots of participatory inequality across these groups. Differences in linguistic, educational, and general assimilation account for participatory differences across Mexican Americans and non-Hispanic whites. Equalizing these factors closes the chasm in participation.

Structuring collaboration in mixed-ability groups to promote verbal interaction, learning, and motivation of average-ability students

Average-ability students often do not take full advantage of learning in mixed-ability groups because they hardly engage in the group interaction. This study examined whether structuring collaboration by group roles and ground rules for helping behavior might help overcome this participatory inequality. In a plant biology course, heterogeneously grouped fourth-grade boys ( n=164) were randomly assigned to a structured collaboration condition or an unconstrained comparison condition. Results indicated positive effects of structured collaboration on average-ability students’ achievement, motivation, and contribution to the group interaction. Another positive result was that structuring collaboration did not lower the scores of the high and low-ability students on these measures.

Assessing the Potential of Internet Political Participation in the United States

An emerging scholarly consensus asserts that patterns of Internet political participation will merely imitate the established patterns of participatory inequality in the United States. Because those from advantaged backgrounds access the medium at higher rates, the opportunities to participate via the Internet should disproportionately extend to high-resource individuals. I argue that the focus on access has important theoretical limitations. If one accepts the future possibility of near-equal access, then explorations of the Internet’s participatory potential should include theoretical guidance about what types of individuals would most likely participate if equal Internet access were achieved. Drawing on diverse literature, two expectations develop; one predicts the reinforcement of existing participation patterns, and the other suggests a change in those patterns to include new types of individuals. I empirically test these competing claims, concluding that given equalized access, the Internet shows genuine potential to bring new individuals into the political process.

SEX AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION: AN EXPLORATORY ANALYSIS OF THE “FEMALE CULTURE”*

ABSTRACTThe study of sexual differences in political participation is increasing in analytic specificity. The present article takes its point of departure in the contention that sexual differences are the major source of participatory inequality in Norway. On the basis of survey data (N= 784), it explores a major hypothesis on sexual variation: the possible existence of a “female culture” which conditions women away from greater involvement. Participation is defined as both electoral and interest‐group involvement, and various indicators of the female culture are studied by regression analysis to determine their effect in relation to other socioeconomic factors. There are two major findings: (1) Both positive and negative evidence of the female culture are revealed, but, with the exception of general political interest, none of the personality, attitude, or value components affect political participation. (2) The variable which explains sexual variation most is an interaction variable composed of gender, family status, and work status. Being married and having children appears to exert strong differential effects on the involvement patterns of women and men, and these patterns can be traced out in terms of gender‐specific profiles of organizational attachment and intra‐organizational recruitment. As a conditioner of political involvement, the female culture is best understood as a question of gender‐specific role demands in relation to the productive and reproductive processes, with clear consequences for organizational preference and political activization.

The Coming Redefinitions of Crime: An Anarchist Perspective

Crime's existence and substance are dependent upon institutionalization of the principle of legality. Crime is a denial of a prospectively defined legal right. A right is a legally guaranteed future access to a valued resource. Crime and penal sanction create a vicious cycle of appropriation. Breaking through this cycle requires an understanding of the structural concomitants of appropriation and law. An analysis of hierarchy, stratification, differentiation, relational quality, individualism, and commitment to structure demonstrates that: (1) distributive and participatory inequality are the foundations for appropriation; and (2) individual claims to appropriate are absurd and unjust because the means of production are the collective work of humankind. An exploration of the assumptions of the principle of legality leads to the inference that any response to human conflict that respects individual authenticity and sovereignty, human diversity, competency, and shared responsibility can only be articulated retrospectively. With an increased awareness that each person is unique, diverse, separate and at once unified in the need to search for meaning, understanding, bonding and solidarity, the concept of justice is evolving. A needs-based conception (to each according to need, taking into account the resources available to all) is replacing a rights-based and deserts-based conception of justice. Though crime, law, and their institutional supports have increased, symbiotic human relationships are also increasingly being crafted from the human sentiments of commiseration and solidarity. If these developments continue to gather momentum, a system of retrospective justice, of needs-based justice, of anarchy, will continuously evolve.