Naslov
Channeling inequalities? Changes in electoral underrepresentation when everyone is equal

Autori
Širinić, Daniela ; Fazekas, Zoltan

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, neobjavljeni rad, znanstveni

Skup
European Consortium of Political Research Graduate Conference

Mjesto i datum
Dublin, Irska, 2010

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
Inequality in electoral participation; stratified bootstrapping

Sažetak
This paper addresses two contemporary issues of citizens' involvement in democracies. The first is the existence of participatory distortions, which lead to disproportionality of citizens’ voices (Verba, 2004). The second issue, ‘‘the participation hypothesis’’ (Milbrath, 1965), concerns the relationship between various forms of participation and claims that the participation through one form encourages participation in another. Given these problems we propose a combined method to analyze the effects of perfect equality (participant public reflects the composition of the population) in non-electoral participation on equality in electoral participation. A counterfactual method is applied to see how inequality in electoral participation changes if the distortions in the non-electoral participation are eliminated. Based on the relevant socio-demographic correlates, we artificially eliminated the underrepresentation for the non-electoral participation types. Correcting for this deficit enables us to see the changes (spillover effects) in the electoral participation in an "ideal situation" of corrected non-electoral participation. We did this with stratified bootstrapping, and then we recalculated electoral underrepresentation. The results were as expected, since there is a statistically significant and substantive spillover effect in the direction of voting from two participation dimensions. Although these are not uniform among the participation dimensions analyzed, we find that eliminating participatory distortion on political participation dimensions does change under- or overrepresentation in voting in the expected way.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Politologija

POVEZANOST RADA