The Income Gap in Voting: Moderating Effects of Income Inequality and Clientelism
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The Income Gap in Voting: Moderating Effects of Income Inequality and Clientelism Twan Huijsmans1 · Arieke J. Rijken2 · Teodora Gaidyte3 Accepted: 6 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract We investigated whether income gaps in voting turnout vary with country-level economic inequality, and whether this pattern differs between wealthier and lesswealthy countries. Moreover, we investigated whether the prevalence of clientelism was the underlying mechanism that accounts for the presumed negative interaction between relative income and economic inequality at lower levels of national wealth per capita. The harmonised PolPart dataset, combining cross-national surveys from 66 countries and 292 country-years, including 510,184 individuals, was analysed using multilevel logistic regression models. We found that the positive effect of relative income on voting was weaker at higher levels of economic inequality, independent of the level of national wealth. Although clientelism partially explains why economic inequality reduces the income gap in voter turnout, it does not do so in the way we expected. It seems to decrease turnout of higher income groups, rather than increase turnout of lower income groups. Importantly, that economic inequality reduces the income gap in voter turnout does not imply that economic inequality is positive for democratic representation, since economic inequality was found to depress the likelihood of voting for all income groups. Keywords Economic inequality · Voting · Relative income · Clientelism
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1110 9-020-09652-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Twan Huijsmans [email protected] 1
Department of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
2
Department of Sociology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
3
Faculty of Humanities, Universiteit Leiden, Leiden, The Netherlands
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Vol.:(0123456789)
Political Behavior
Introduction It has been well established in the literature that “people with less vote less” (Laurison 2016, p. 684). Many studies, conducted in Western democracies, showed that the less income an individual has, the less likely he or she is to vote and participate in other forms of politics (e.g. Brady et al. 1995; Solt 2008, 2010, 2015; Jensen and Jespersen 2017; Armingeon and Schädel 2015; Hakhverdian et al. 2012; Smets and Van Ham 2013; Geys 2006). The existing research also revealed that the income gap in political participation differs between countries. To what extent people with different levels of income turn in ballots in a certain country depends on political and socio-economic conditions, economic inequality being among the most important ones (Solt 2008, 2010; Scervini and Segatti 2012; Jaime-Castillo 2009; Matsubayashi and Sakaiya 2018). However, the findings in the literature on how economic inequality at the country level affects the income gap in voting turnout are conf
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