A Healthy Democracy? Evidence of Unequal Representation Across Health Status
- PDF / 676,328 Bytes
- 23 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 50 Downloads / 203 Views
A Healthy Democracy? Evidence of Unequal Representation Across Health Status Julianna Pacheco1 · Christopher Ojeda2
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Research on the link between health and political behavior has flourished, yet there have been no analyses regarding the political consequences of health inequalities. Using data from the 2012 CCES, we find that health is associated with representation. Healthy individuals are better represented compared to unhealthy citizens; this positive association is particularly true for individuals in the top third income group and when citizens are represented by Republicans. We explore two mechanisms that may account for this association. The participatory mechanism suggests that healthy individuals are better represented due to differences in political participation while the preferential mechanism suggests that differences are due to shifts in policy preferences. Overall, we find little evidence that either mechanism fully accounts for the association between health and representation. While the results clearly suggest that political clout is not just about income, but also health, scholars are encouraged to further explain this association. Keywords Representation · Health · Political participation · Responsiveness Health affects nearly every aspect of our lives and recent work in political science suggests it is also important for political behavior and public opinion. Better health is associated with political participation among youths (Ojeda and Julianna 2017) and adults (e.g., Mattila et al. 2013; Schur et al. 2002; Burden et al. 2016) even after controlling for socioeconomic status (Pacheco and Fletcher 2015). Health is Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1110 9-019-09541-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Julianna Pacheco Julianna‑[email protected] Christopher Ojeda [email protected] 1
The University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA
2
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, USA
13
Vol.:(0123456789)
Political Behavior
also associated with party identification (Schur and Meera 2012), views toward the effectiveness of social policy in improving public health (Robert and Booske 2011), government involvement in healthcare (Schur and Meera 2012), and specific components of the Affordable Care Act (Richardson and Konisky 2013). This research has prompted calls for scholars to expand their research on health outcomes and political behavior. At the same time that research on the link between health and political behavior has flourished, there have been no systematic analyses on the political consequences of health inequalities. The empirical evidence at the individual level suggests a cycle linking population health to politics such that increasing health disparities may produce increasing inequalities in representation, which in turn produces policies that may be detrimental to the unhealthy, which in turn creates even
Data Loading...
