The Two Income-Participation Gaps

Scholars have long attributed the income-participation gap—which is the observation that the rich participate in politics more than the poor—to income-based differences in the resources, recruitment, mobilization, and psychology underpinning political behavior. I argue that these explanations require a longer time horizon than the empirical evidence permits. Education, for example, typically ends in young adulthood and so cannot logically mediate the effect of income on participation in late adulthood. To resolve this temporal problem, I propose that there are two income-participation gaps: one based on current economic status and another on childhood economic history. I situate this argument in a developmental framework and present evidence for it using six studies. The results, while mixed at times, indicate that there are two gaps, that the size of each gap changes over the life course, and that their joint effect creates a larger income-participation gap than estimated by prior research. Replication Materials: The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/XU8ZWB. One well-documented finding in the study of political behavior is that the rich participate in politics more than the poor (Blais 2006; Rosenstone 1982; Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2012; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995), a stylized fact that I refer to as the income-participation gap. Due in part to the gap’s empirical prevalence and normative implications, the American Political Science Association commissioned a task force to report on how economic inequality affects democracy. They concluded that “the voices of American citizens are raised and heard unequally. Citizens with lower or moderate incomes speak with a whisper that is lost on the ears of inattentive government officials” (American Political Science Association 2004, 1). Although subsequent research shows that the effect of income is smaller than other predictors of participation, such as education or interest in politics (Smets and Van Ham 2013), income remains one of the most consequential. As Leighley and Nagler note, “income is the most widely used and recognized demographic criteria by which government distributes benefits. [I]f poor people do not vote, they could find government policy explicitly written to disadvantage them” (2013, 24). The repercussions for representation are not hypothetical, Christopher Ojeda is Assistant Professor, University of Tennessee, Department of Political Science, 1001 McClung Tower, Knoxville, TN 37996-0410 (ojeda.christopher@gmail.com). I thank Eric Plutzer, Michael Berkman, Pete Hatemi, Jenae Neiderhiser, Julianna Pacheco, Lee Hannah, Anne Whitesell, and Costas Panagopoulos for helpful comments on the article and the Russell Sage Foundation for their generous financial support of this research (RSF 83.13.12, “Pathways to Participation”). All errors are my own. however: Parties support positions and policy makers craft legislation that differentially benefits the rich (Bartels 2008; Gilens 2012; Rigby and Wright 2013). Simply put, even modest income-based differences in participation can have large ramifications for who gets what, when, and how. Empirically, research on the income-participation gap has coalesced around the notion that current income is the appropriate measure of economic status. Researchers using survey data typically ask respondents about their household income in the year preceding the interview and then include the responses in models of political participation. This approach, however, overlooks the fact that individuals have diverse childhood backgrounds. Might economic history also be an appropriate measure of economic status and one that matters to political participation? Growing up in or even briefly experiencing poverty as a child has negative consequences in adulthood—poor health, reduced cognitive ability, mental health disorders, and limited educational opportunities, to name just a few (Brooks-Gunn and Duncan 1997). It seems obvious then that if poor and rich “youth arrive at their late teens with vastly different capacities and resources to navigate the various transitions, such American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 62, No. 4, October 2018, Pp. 813–829 C ©2018, Midwest Political Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12375