Welfare States Matter for Democracy: Income-based Participatory Inequality in Post-WW 2 Western Democracies

Abstract

Poorer citizens generally participate less in politics; at the same time, the income-based gap in participation is not the same across democracies. Whereas in Denmark in 1977 turnout among poorer citizens was 6 percentage points higher than among wealthier ones, in the United States in 1988 the gap is reversed: turnout among wealthier Americans is 31 percentage points higher than among their poorer peers. Existing attempts at understanding the sources of this variation point to macro-level factors, such as compulsory voting, ballot complexity, or income inequality (Gallego, 2015; Solt, 2008). Though important, we argue that existing accounts aren't successful in explaining temporal variation in this participation gap, over periods of time in which the institutional framework is stable. We propose instead a largely neglected, yet plausible, reason for why a differential effect of income on political participation exists: the characteristics of the welfare state. In addition to providing resources relevant to participation, welfare state arrangements also create political constituencies that can be mobilized around a shared goal by political entrepreneurs. Building on Schneider and Makszin's (2014) education-based analysis we inductively develop, with the use of Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), various welfare regime types that condition patterns of income-based participatory inequality in democracies. These are produced based on an original data set of roughly 150 merged surveys from 19 OECD members, between 1960 and 2010. We label these types the supportive and mobilizing welfare regimes, along with their non-mobilizing and non-supportive counterparts. These welfare state regimes correspond to different mechanisms through which welfare state characteristics shape participatory patterns: (1) resource endowments available to individuals for participation and (2) unions' and parties' ability to politically mobilize and inform their members. We complement our aggregate-level QCA analysis with individual-level tests of these hypothesized mechanisms. Relying on six cross-national survey programs, such as the European Social Survey or the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we find consistent support for the mobilization-based mechanisms, while revealing mixed evidence that they also spill over into attitudinal factors which underpin participation. Only weaker evidence is found for our resource-based mechanisms. Overall, our results indicate the effect of welfare state characteristics on political participation gaps in advanced industrial democracies. Welfare state reforms, and in particular retrenchment, are likely to have (damaging) consequences for democracy.