Poverty And Civic Activism

This paper hypothesizes that country poverty is negatively associated with the civic activism of its citizens. It employs cross country regression analysis to test the proposition. In general, the findings of the paper lend support to the contention that greater civic activism leads to reduced poverty. Poverty is a worldwide problem. One of the possible ways that pressure can be brought to bear to change a country’s policies, institutions, attitudes, and beliefs is through civic activism and protest. Without expressed discontent, the status quo tends to prevail. A large part of the civil rights legislation enacted in the U.S. is the product of the intense civic engagement. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate whether civic activism is consequential for poverty. Specifically, it is posited that poverty is inversely related to civic activism, with greater civic activism leading to reduced poverty. The paper is divided into five sections. The first section of the paper consists of a small literature review that highlights some of the recent findings regarding variables that might explain poverty. The second section provides a little model that focuses on civic activism as a potential determinant of poverty. The third section discusses the variables that are used in the empirical section, assigns variable names to these variables, and identifies their sources. The fourth section presents, and subsequently analyzes, the results of cross country regressions of poverty on civic activism. Finally, the fifth section finishes up by providing a brief conclusion. I. Backround Literature Maia Green and David Hulme maintain that the underlying real causes of poverty are the social relations that allow poverty to exist (Green and Hulme 2004). They view the values, the norms, and the institutions associated with these poverty permitting social relations as the problem. With regard to the present paper, if Green and Hulme’s framework for looking at poverty has merit, then one might expect civic activism, to have a strong potential influence on poverty, as civic activism is a major means through which the populace can effect change on society. Using 1990s survey data for seven Caribbean countries, defining youth as those from 14 to 24 years of age, and employing three different measures of poverty, Boxill and Quarless look at determinants of poverty (Boxill and Quarless 2005). They find that lower levels of education, being a female headed household, and living in rural areas are associated with higher rates of youth poverty. Controlling for economic affluence and a whole host of other socio-economic variables, Dewilde uses a generalized logit model on a sample of 60,071 respondents from ten different European countries to investigate the effect of instructional arrangements on poverty (Caroline Dewilde 2007). Among her various findings, she finds support for the notion that countries with institutional set-ups providing greater income replacement reduce the risk of experiencing poverty. Jonathan Goodhand discusses war and chronic poverty, poverty with long time duration (Goodhand 2003). He feels that the weight of the evidence in the literature tends to support the notion that war is a cause of chronic poverty. Brady, Fullerton and Cross investigate how political context, as opposed to characteristics of individuals, affect adult poverty (Brady, Fullerton and Cross 2009). They conduct a multi-level analysis of adult poverty on 18 developed western countries using data from the Luxembourg income study on a sample of 336,066 individuals. They find that a variety of individual characteristics affect the odds of being in poverty, but also that the extent of welfare generosity has a powerful poverty reducing effect after adjusting for individual characteristics. In addition, their results seem to indicate that unionization and leftist party affiliation exert their influence on adult poverty indirectly through their impact on the welfare generosity of the state. Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, Chen and Corak employ decomposition analysis to look at changes in child poverty in 12 OECD countries over the decade of the 1990s (Chen and Corak 2008). They find that greater labor force Journal of Business Management & Social Sciences Research (JBM&SSR) ISSN No: 2319-5614 Volume 2, No.6, June 2013 _________________________________________________________________________________ www.borjournals.com Blue Ocean Research Journals 32 engagement of mothers, increased employment of fathers, and higher earnings of fathers, lowers child poverty. Habibov maintains that the extent of public support for the welfare state depends on the public’s belief concerning the causes of poverty (Habibov 2010). If the causes of poverty are attributed to inadequacy of individuals then there is likely to be less support for the welfare state than if the causes are attributed to structural economic factors outside the control of individuals. Looking at nine transitional economies (economies making the transition from socialist to post socialist economies) in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and using data from the 2006 Life in Transition Survey, he finds that for a majority of countries that the public subjectively perceives structural factors as the main cause of poverty. II. A Model Of Poverty And Civic