Economic Inequality and Democratic Political Engagement

Frederick Solt Southern Illinois University

What effect, if any, does the extent of economic inequality in a country have upon the political engagement of its citizens? This study examines this question using data from multiple cross-national surveys of the advanced industrial democracies. It tests the theory that greater inequality increases the relative power of the wealthy to shape politics in their own favor against rival arguments that focus on the effects of inequality on citizens’ objective interests or the resources they have available for political engagement. The analysis demonstrates that higher levels of income inequality powerfully depress political interest, the frequency of political discussion, and participation in elections among all but the most affluent citizens, providing compelling evidence that greater economic inequality yields greater political inequality.

Economic inequality has been rising in nearly all of the advanced industrial democracies over the past two decades (e.g., Smeeding 2005). The conse-

quences of this greater economic inequality for the politics of these countries, however, have gone almost completely unexamined in the empirical literature. As the recent APSA Task Force on Inequality and American Democ- racy was forced to conclude, “we know little about the connections between changing economic inequality and changes in political behavior” (2004, 661).

This study examines how economic inequality affects a central attribute of democracies, their ability to sus- tain the active engagement of their citizens in the political process. Using standardized data from over a dozen cross- national surveys of the world’s rich democracies in a series of multilevel models, it tests three rival theories that offer very different predictions regarding inequality’s relation- ship with political engagement. The analyses demonstrate that economic inequality powerfully depresses political interest, discussion of politics, and participation in elec- tions among all but the most affluent and that this nega- tive effect increases with declining relative income. These results support only the relative power theory of politi- cal engagement, which maintains that where income and wealth are more concentrated, power will also be more concentrated and that the less affluent will therefore be more likely to find that the issues debated are not those

Frederick Solt is assistant professor of political science, Southern IL University, Mailstop 4501, Carbondale, IL 62901 ([email protected]).

I am grateful to Stephen Bloom, Mariola Espinosa, Philip Habel, Jonathan Hartlyn, Evelyne Huber, Christine Lipsmeyer, Lanny Martin, Scott McClurg, Celeste Montoya, Marco Steenbergen, John Stephens, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this work.

that interest them, to give up on discussing political mat- ters, and to conclude that, given the options presented, participating in elections is just not worth their effort. This finding has important implications for our under- standing of political participation, of the politics of redis- tribution, and of democracy.

Theories of Inequality and Engagement

The nature of the relationship between the extent of economic inequality in a country and the political en-

gagement of that country’s citizens has been the subject of considerable debate. Some democratic theorists treat as essentially self-evident the proposition that economic inequality should be expected to depress political engage- ment, and particularly that of poorer citizens (see, e.g., Dahl 2006, 85–86). Other political scientists, however, continue to argue that greater inequality should result in more political engagement (e.g., Brady 2004; Oliver 2001) or that it discourages engagement among poorer in- dividuals while stimulating the engagement of the more affluent (e.g., Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, and Snyder 2003). This section explains the three theories behind these conflicting perspectives and reviews the scant em- pirical literature on the topic.

American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 52, No. 1, January 2008, Pp. 48–60

C©2008, Midwest Political Science Association ISSN 0092-5853

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ECONOMIC INEQUALITY AND POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT 49

First, the relative power theory contends that eco- nomic inequality should have a negative effect on politi- cal engagement generally and among poorer individuals especially due to its consequences for the distribution of power. It maintains that because money can be used to in- fluence others, if a country’s income and wealth are more concentrated, power within the country will be more con- centrated; that is, where rich individuals are richer relative to poor individuals, they will be more powerful relative to these poor individuals as well (Goodin and Dryzek 1980). This larger power imbalance shapes the political landscape through its impact on whatever issues might cleave richer people from their poorer fellow citizens. First, wealth- ier individuals’ larger power advantage allows them to more consistently prevail in any open conflicts on these issues (e.g., Goodin and Dryzek 1980, 286). Second, it allows richer citizens to more successfully preclude these issues from even being publicly debated (Bachrach and Baratz 1970, 6–11). No coordination—or even intent—is required for this to occur: by using their money to am- plify their own speech in arguments on some issues, more affluent people can drown out the voices of poorer cit- izens and so keep the issues they would raise from be- ing discussed (Schattschneider 1960, 106). And third, it eventually convinces poorer individuals who consistently find themselves unable to prevail in political contests or even to gain a hearing for their positions that their inter- ests cannot be pursued through the political process; they therefore abandon preferences that have no chance of be- ing enacted (Lukes 2005, 27). Through repeated failures, these poorer citizens come to conclude that their condi- tion is natural, destined by fate, or simply no less than they deserve, and they internalize “the values, beliefs, or rules of the game of the powerful as a further adaptive response—i.e., as a means of escaping the subjective sense of powerlessness if not its objective condition” (Gaventa 1980, 17).

The systematic removal of these issues from the po- litical agenda has predictable consequences for political engagement.1 Poorer citizens, confronted by a political system that fails even to develop alternatives regarding

1Indeed, declining engagement may be the only observable indica- tion that the scope of politics is being constrained—it is very diffi- cult, perhaps impossible, to surmise which issues among those that remain undebated and uncontemplated would be on the agenda or in people’s thoughts if not for the exercise of greater relative power (see, e.g., Bachrach and Baratz 1970, 49–50). Although the second dimension of power tends to increase the divergence between the issues contested (as evidenced by conflicting party platforms, for example) and citizens’ expressed preferences, the third dimension tends to reduce it. The relative power theory therefore makes no firm prediction about the extent of this divergence. In any event, the goal of this work is not to examine every implication of the relative power theory but rather to test which, if any, of the the-

many issues of importance to them, can be expected to become more and more likely to rationally conclude that there is little point to being engaged in politics (e.g., Gaventa 1980, 9–13; Pateman 1971, 297–98; Schattschnei- der 1960, 105). Richer citizens’ need to engage in the political process to defend their interests from the chal- lenges of poorer individuals declines as these issues are re- moved from debate, but their political engagement should nevertheless continue to be motivated to some extent by their conflicts with each other (Schattschneider 1960, 105–7). Inequality should therefore have a negative im- pact on the political engagement of richer citizens as well as poorer citizens, although its effect on the former should be smaller than its effect on the latter.

Second, the conflict theory holds just the opposite position: that inequality should be expected to increase people’s engagement in politics. According to this argu- ment, higher levels of inequality cause divergences in po- litical preferences that fuel debates about the appropriate course of policy; these debates then cause higher rates of political mobilization. More inequality means that the poor are poorer relative to their fellow citizens, so redis- tributive policies should become more attractive to them as a means of improving their circumstances (Meltzer and Richard 1981). But redistribution becomes more costly to the well-off as inequality increases, so wealthy individuals should become increasingly strident in their opposition to such policies. In fact, when the rich are richer, their poten- tial gains from lower tax rates are greater, so they should be expected to seek policies that reduce rather than increase redistribution.

By inferring individuals’ political preferences from their positions within the country’s income distribution in this way, the conflict theory predicts that the views of richer and poorer citizens will be more opposed at higher levels of inequality. These increasingly incompatible pref- erences, in this view, should lead not to the quiescence suggested by relative power theory but rather to more con- flictive politics. The more conflictive politics present when inequality is greater should in turn stimulate more interest and participation in the political process. Conversely, con- texts of lower inequality should lead to fewer demands on government, greater consensus about the shape of policy, and so less engaging politics (Brady 2004; Oliver 2001).

Third, the resource theory maintains that whether economic inequality has a negative relationship to po- litical engagement or a positive one depends on each individual’s income. Unlike the two previous theories, the resource theory does not contend that the context

ories regarding the relationship between economic inequality and democratic political engagement is supported empirically.

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50 FREDERICK SOLT

of inequality has a broad impact on the shape of politics; instead, it examines only the ramifications of inequal- ity for citizens as individuals. It is derived from the view that to be engaged in politics requires resources: “time to take part, money to contribute to campaigns and other political causes, and skills to use time and money effec- tively” (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995, 16). Individ- uals therefore can be expected to make decisions about engaging in politics just as they make decisions to con- sume any other good; that is, they will be engaged only to the extent they are willing to pay the costs. As a con- sequence, they will do so more as their incomes increase (Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, and Snyder 2003, 117–18). According to the resource theory, then, inequality should affect political engagement because for any given average income, higher levels of inequality mean fewer resources with which to pay the costs of engagement for a country’s poorer citizens and more such resources for its richer cit- izens. Greater inequality should therefore be expected to result in less political engagement among the relatively poor, but more political engagement among the better off.

Despite these three contradictory theories, few em- pirical works have directly addressed the effects of eco- nomic inequality on political engagement, and none have been fully convincing. Goodin and Dryzek (1980) and found that the relationships between income inequality and turnout in elections were strongly negative across 38 democracies in the late 1950s and across 42 U.S. metropolitan areas in the early 1960s. Their analyses, how- ever, failed to include controls for the many individual and national characteristics that are also thought to affect elec- toral participation. Boix (2003) and Solt (2004) similarly found that differing levels of economic inequality had im- portant negative effects on subnational turnout rates in the United States early in the twentieth century and in Italy during the 1970s and 1980s, respectively, but their single-country research designs leave questions regarding the generalizability of their results. Oliver’s (2001, 86–93) finding of a positive relationship between municipal-level income inequality and local political engagement in the United States in 1990 suffers the same shortcoming, and the distinctive character of inequality in U.S. municipal- ities further cautions against drawing more general con- clusions from this work.2 None of these studies included

2Income equality at the municipal level in the United States is well understood to be driven by income inequality on the regional scale: the rich are more likely to seek to distance themselves from the poor or to generate housing prices high enough to force the poor to relocate as the difference between rich and poor grows (e.g., Mayer 2001). Oliver’s finding of increased political participation with greater municipal inequality therefore may simply be a re-

tests to determine whether the effects of inequality vary according to individuals’ incomes as predicted by the rel- ative power and resource theories. It is very difficult to assess the interconnections, if any, between economic in- equality and political behavior on the basis of such scant and conflicting evidence. As the APSA Task Force con- cluded, “there is an urgent need for research that analyzes these interconnections” (2004, 655).

Data and Measures

This article addresses the question by examining the relationship between economic inequality and political engagement in a diverse sample of rich and upper-middle- income democracies. Countries under authoritarian rule are excluded because political engagement is a distinctly different phenomenon in authoritarian regimes; partic- ipation in elections, for example, is simultaneously co- erced and an instrument of coercion. Therefore, only democratic countries were considered: countries in which contested elections with broad suffrage determined the occupants of the most important political offices. Dif- ferences in the character of much political engagement in the democracies of the developing world similarly counsel against including these countries in this study. Many impoverished citizens in these poorer democracies trade their political support for particularistic benefits and lose access to these needed resources if they fail to vote as directed. Participating in clientelistic networks in this way is distinctly different from engaging in politics to express one’s political preferences; indeed, clientelist political engagement is often viewed as evidence of the absence of democratic rights rather than their exercise (e.g., Huber, Rueschemeyer, and Stephens 1997, 344).3

This study therefore focuses on political engagement in the contemporary industrialized democracies, where co- ercion and clientelism are relatively rare, and leaves the relationship between inequality and engagement under authoritarian rule and in the developing world as topics for future research.

Drawing accurate cross-level inferences about the ef- fects of an aspect of context, such as economic inequal- ity, on individuals’ attitudes and behavior, such as their political engagement, requires information about both

flection of the concomitant equality of the larger region (cf. Oliver 2001, 96–98).

3The fact that widespread clientelism occurs in the countries of the developing world, where great economic inequality provides the wealthy with the resources necessary to directly buy the votes of the poor, can be seen as providing preliminary support for the relative power theory (see Huber, Rueschemeyer, and Stephens 1997, 344).

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ECONOMIC INEQUALITY AND POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT 51

the individual and the context (e.g., Achen and Shively 1995). The individual-level data used here come from a collection of cross-national surveys. These surveys were selected to provide the maximum amount of variation in context while maintaining equivalent indicators for the variables considered in this study. The countries and years included in each analysis, along with the surveys that provided the individual-level data, are listed in the appendix.

Dependent Variables

The dependent variables measure three different aspects of political engagement: interest in politics, discussion of political issues, and participation in elections. Each of these variables is described below.

Political Interest. Data on political interest for 22 countries in 71 country-years come from the World Val- ues Survey, the Eurobarometer, and the European Election Survey; details are provided in the appendix. These sur- veys asked respondents to describe their interest in politics on a four-point scale ranging from (1) not at all interested, through (2) not very interested and (3) somewhat inter- ested, to (4) very interested. The mean political-interest score across countries and years is slightly below 2.5. On average, the Spanish expressed the least interest in pol- itics: in 1990 the mean political-interest score in Spain was only 1.8, with nearly half reporting that they were not at all interested. The two highest mean political-interest scores were recorded in Germany. In 1990 and again in 1997, over three-quarters of Germans said they were at least somewhat interested in politics, and the mean score across the country was 3.0 in both years. Interest in poli- tics varies over time as well as across countries: the mean level of political interest in Britain dropped steadily from 2.7 in 1988 to just 2.0 in 1999.

Political Discussion. The frequency with which peo- ple discuss politics has long been considered an impor- tant indicator of their active participation in politics, and both the World Values Survey and the Eurobarometer se- ries regularly include an item tapping political discussion. For this study, these surveys provide information about political discussion in 22 countries in a total of 62 dif- ferent country-years, which are listed in the appendix. Respondents reported how often they discussed politi- cal matters with their friends on a three-point scale: (1) never, (2) occasionally, or (3) frequently. Most people say that they occasionally discuss politics: on average across countries and years, 27% of citizens never discuss pol- itics, and just 17% claim to frequently discuss political issues. But the patterns of political discussion vary greatly

from one country to another and over time. In 1990, fewer than one in ten Norwegians declared that they never dis- cussed politics. By contrast, over half of British citizens completely avoided talking about politics in 1999, twice as many as did in 1988. Only 7% of Spanish respondents in 1988 and Finnish respondents in 2000 frequently en- gaged in political discussion; the highest rate of frequent political discussion was found in Israel in 2001, 38%. The percentage of Italians who frequently discussed politics more than doubled from 1988 to 1995, from 11% to 26%, only to fall again to 14% in 1999.

Electoral Participation. Participation in elections is the most studied aspect of democratic political engage- ment. Data on whether individual respondents voted in the last national election were collected for 59 elections in 23 democracies from the Eurobarometer, the Interna- tional Social Survey Program’s Role of Government , the European Election Study, and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems series of surveys; details are in the ap- pendix. The average reported turnout across elections was 78.5%, but as is well known, voting rates vary considerably across countries and over time. A little over half of Polish citizens typically reported participating in their national elections; on the other hand, consistently more than 90% of Australian citizens said they had voted. Reported voting rates in Austria fell from 85.1% in the 1986 parliamentary election, well above the average turnout, to just 72.9% in 1994, well below it.

Independent Variables

Economic Inequality. Part of the reason so little progress has been made in the study of the political consequences of economic inequality has been the lack of inequality data suitable for cross-national comparisons. Fortunately, the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) is remedying this prob- lem by collecting the results of many trustworthy national income surveys and using a consistent methodology to calculate income inequality statistics for many countries at multiple points in time. The unparalleled comparabil- ity of the LIS data makes it possible to analyze the effects of income inequality on political engagement across democ- racies.4

The LIS Gini index of household income inequal- ity serves as the measure of economic inequality in this

4Although perfect comparability is impossible, the LIS data are ac- knowledged to be the best available and are widely accepted in the study of income trends (see Smeeding 2005). For a complete de- scription of the LIS project and access to the inequality data used in this article, see http://www.lisproject.org.

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52 FREDERICK SOLT

FIGURE 1 Income Inequality in Five Democracies, 1984 to 2000

.2

.22

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.26

.28

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.32

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.36

.38

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G in

i I nd

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1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 Year

United States Great Britain

Canada Germany Sweden

study.5 The Gini index has a theoretical range from 0, in- dicating that each household receives an equal share of income, to 1, indicating that a single household receives all income. Intermediate values may be interpreted as the proportion of income that would have to be redistributed to achieve perfect equality across households. Figure 1 dis- plays the trends in the LIS data from 1984 to 2000 in five countries: the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Ger- many, and Sweden. The United States and Great Britain have some of the highest levels of income inequality among countries in the LIS dataset that were democratic during the time period considered in this study, while Sweden was among the most egalitarian countries in the dataset. Canada and Germany were close to the median of the countries studied in terms of income inequality for most of the period examined.

Income. Relative, rather than absolute, income is the theoretically important variable: in both the relative power and resource theories, the effect of the distribu- tion of economic resources on an individual’s political engagement is hypothesized to depend on where in this distribution the individual falls. For this study, the in- come quintile of each respondent’s household is used as the measure of income, with the poorest quintile coded as 1 and the richest quintile coded as 5.

5Household income is net of transfers and direct taxes. Household size and composition are taken into account by dividing each house- hold’s income by the number of equivalent adults, calculated as the square root of the number of persons in the household (Smeeding 2005).

Control Variables

The literature on the causes of political engagement is extensive, and many characteristics of individuals and as- pects of their contexts have been suggested as explana- tions. Education and age have been repeatedly shown to be the two most powerful individual-level influences of political engagement; their effects are typically attributed to their contributions to citizens’ ability to assess the im- portance of politics and the consequences of their par- ticipation. Many other demographic characteristics have also been argued to affect political engagement and are included as controls in this study (see, e.g., Verba, Schloz- man, and Brady 1995). Although women tend to vote at similar rates to men, they have been found to be less engaged in politics otherwise. Married people are more likely to remind each other to vote than single people, but they are less likely to have or spend free time to other- wise engage in politics; free time and therefore political engagement decline further as the number of children in the family increases. Those in the workforce are thought to be more likely to be politically engaged than those who are not employed. The inhabitants of rural locations and small towns—for the purposes of this study, those living in locations with fewer than 2,000 inhabitants—are less likely to be politically engaged than those in suburban or urban locations (Oliver 2001, 48–50). Labor unions work to politically organize and mobilize their members, lead- ing union members to be more engaged in politics (e.g., Radcliff and Davis 2000). Those who are active mem- bers of churches may gain skills through their participa- tion that then facilitate their political engagement, and churches also frequently seek to mobilize their members electorally (e.g., Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995, 320– 25).

Most cross-national work on the determinants of political engagement, however, focuses on institutional characteristics. Presidentialism, by separating executive and legislative power, provides citizens with an additional point of influence on policymaking and can therefore be expected to facilitate political engagement generally, but this division of power reduces accountability and so decreases the salience of elections (Lijphart 1999).6 Fed- eralism similarly increases the number of access points available to citizens and also allows politics to be more closely tailored to regional concerns, encouraging inter- est and discussion of politics (Lijphart 1999, 186–87). But

6Presidential systems are defined here as those with (1) a popu- larly elected president who (2) exercises real political power, either legislative powers of veto or decree or nonlegislative powers to ap- point cabinet ministers or dissolve parliament (see, e.g., Lijphart 1999, 117–24).

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ECONOMIC INEQUALITY AND POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT 53

in distributing power to regional governments, federalism makes national elections less important and so discour- ages voting (e.g., Blais and Carty 1990). Unicameral leg- islatures make policymaking more decisive, heighten the stakes of politics, and so increase political engagement (e.g., Jackman and Miller 1995, 470–71).7 Enforced laws that make voting compulsory are thought to be effec- tive in boosting electoral participation, but whether they similarly increase other aspects of political engagement is doubtful (Jackman and Miller 1995, 481). Higher district magnitudes are hypothesized to generate more political engagement: by increasing the proportionality between votes

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