SHIFTING INEQUALITIES

ABSTRACT

Participation patterns in industrialized democracies have changed considerably in the last couple of decades. While institutionalized forms of participation (e.g., party membership) are declining, we can observe a rise in the occurrence of non-institutionalized forms of political participation. In this article we pose the question of what the effect of this trend has been for patterns of political stratification during the period 1974–2002 using the Political Action Survey as well as the European Social Survey. It can be observed that gender differences have been substantially reduced and in some cases even reversed for non-institutionalized participation and women tend to be more active in these forms than men. Younger age groups also clearly have a preference for non-institutionalized forms. Stratification based on education, however, remains the same compared to the 1970s. These findings are confirmed by a longitudinal analysis of Dutch Election Studies data for the period 1971–1998. We conclude that the emergence of new forms of political participation might have reduced age and gender based inequalities; however, it does not offer a solution for inequalities based on education.

Keywords:

• inequality in political participation
• participation paradox
• emerging forms of participation
• Western Europe
• conventional forms of political participation

Notes

1. However, see an exception in Baum and Santo (2007: 191), who found that the gender gap persists in unconventional forms of participation in Portugal, in large part due to a continuing gender gap in education and feelings of lower internal political efficacy among women compared to men.

2. For a full description of the Political Action data, see Barnes and Kaase (1979: 537–91). Fieldwork for this survey was done in 1973–1975, with most interviews being conducted in 1974.

3. For a full description of the ESS data, see www.europeansocialsurvey.org.

4. Parts of the CID data has been designed for a merger with the 2002 ESS data; for a full description of the CID data and its design, see http://www.uscidsurvey.org.

5. For a description of the Dutch Elections Studies (1971, 1972, 1977, 1981, 1982, 1986, 1989, 1994 and 1998), see http://www.bsk.utwente.nl/skon.

6. Family income, too, could be considered as an important source of inequality. Income, however, is always difficult to measure reliably in survey research, and this proved to be especially the case when pooling various countries across time. Since almost every survey used its own classification system for income, we did not succeed in assembling a reliable and comparable measurement of income across time. Therefore, in the subsequent analysis, we will stress the importance of education level, since this is the closest measurement to socio-economic status measured reliably.

7. The results are the same when all interaction terms are included in one model.