Unequal Political Participation Worldwide

Highly educated citizens vote at much lower rates than less educated citizens in some countries. By contrast, electoral participation exhibits no such bias in other countries as diverse as Spain, Denmark, and South Korea. This book describes the levels of unequal participation in thirty-six countries worldwide, examines possible causes of this phenomenon, and discusses its consequences. Aina Gallego illustrates how electoral procedures, party and media systems, unionization, and income inequality impact unequal participation through an original combination of cross-national survey data and survey experiments.

Introduction; 1. Unequal participation around the world; 2. Heterogeneous consequences of contexts on participation; 3. The difficulty of the voting procedure; 4. Government fragmentation and media systems; 5. Trade unions in the highly educated membership era; 6. Income inequality and the participation of lower-status groups; 7. Consequences of unequal participation for representation; Conclusions.

Aina Gallego is a Ramon y Cajal Fellow at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies. She completed her doctoral dissertation at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in 2008, and she was a postdoctoral scholar at Stanford University and the Spanish High Research Council. Her research focuses on several aspects of democratic representation, including inequalities in voter turnout and political participation, the formation of political preferences, and the effects of electoral systems and income inequality on political behavior.