Book review: Unequal Political Participation Worldwide

Unequal Political Participation Worldwide is a unique contribution by a young scholar to the ever growing literature on electoral participation. The emphasis of the book is explicitly directed at inequalities in participation that are linked to education (p. 14). In this regard, a widely supported notion in the existing literature suggests that well-educated individuals are much more likely to turn out in elections than poorly educated citizens, thus indicating that one of the basic tenets of democracy – one person, one vote – is completely violated as participation tends to be unequal. This claim therefore begs for an answer to the question: Is unequal participation universal? Relying on a creative mixture of cross-national survey data buttressed by survey experiments, Gallego rebuffs the general assertion that highly educated citizens turn out to vote at higher rates by proposing that this differs across countries and is dependent upon a set of contextual features.

The book is divided into seven chapters. She begins with two chapters that explore the issues of definition, unfold disparities of unequal participation across countries and set out a general theoretical benchmark upon which the phenomenon of unequal participation could be understood; while also incorporating a debate as to why citizens tend to engage in electoral politics. From chapters 3 to 6, the book moves from being descriptive to verifying explanations and facts; and, finally, chapter 7 focuses on the consequences of unequal participation for democratic societies.

Returning to the book’s central argument, Gallego contends that:

to understand unequal participation, we should think about which characteristics of the context can effect highly and less educated individuals in heterogeneous ways. That is, contextual characteristics that affect the cognitive costs of voting should affect the propensity to vote of members of different groups heterogeneously (p. 195).

The hypotheses for each of these contextual variables are then tested through bivariate, multivariate and survey experiments. The importance of Gallego’s findings is, of course, determined significantly by the quality upon which her evidence is constructed. First, she posits that the use of complex voting procedures, such as ballot structure and registration procedures, is inclined to increase and imposes additional costs on citizens, especially the cognitive cost of voting. An increase in this cognitive cost invariably reduces, lowers and depresses the participation rates of poorly educated citizens who find it hard to understand the administrative hurdles connected with voting. On the other hand, the participation rates of highly educated individuals are not in any way affected.

Second, government fragmentation (coalition government) is felt to be another predictor of unequal participation. While highly educated citizens may find it easy to learn about a likely coalition, the position of the partners and the likely results of negotiations, this may be very challenging for poorly educated voters. Her empirical results reveal that coalition government does indeed both lower participation rates and result in larger turnout inequality.

Third, the media system and ease of access to political information is another contextual variable that is posited to profoundly shape levels of political awareness and, of course, unequal participation. Public service–oriented media systems are associated with smaller participatory gaps; this is not the case with the private service media.

Fourth, she examines whether trade unions affect turnout inequality. Her main contention is that while trade unions increase voter participation, they may not affect turnout inequality much.

Finally, the relationship between income inequality and turnout inequality is also examined. Her results are quite surprising showing that turnout gaps due to both education and income are, on average, larger in countries where income inequality before taxes and transfers is high. On the other hand, income inequality effects after taxes and transfers seem to be weak or non-existent.

Nevertheless, regardless of the results that are presented here, there are some weakness with this book. At first glance, Gallego’s book is titled: Unequal Political Participation Worldwide. However, one quickly realizes that a good number of her cases are from older or advanced democracies in Western Europe (16) and North America (2). These are followed by post-communist countries (8) – which, I argue, are much more similar to West European democracies – South America (4), Asia (4) and Oceania (2), while no electoral democracies in Africa are included. Understanding unequal participation in new emerging democracies has yet to receive significant attention and the book falls short of this by virtue of the fact that a large number of Gallego’s cases are drawn from industrial democracies in Western Europe. It would, therefore, have been good if Gallego had run her analysis on other data sets such as Afrobarometer, Latino barometer or Asia barometer in order to access the reliability of her results. Furthermore, she also fails to report some of her results and her drive to pool both survey experiments and cross-national survey data is found wanting and limited to a few contextual variables.

Regardless of the aforementioned criticisms, however, Gallego has written a very good book. Her theorization and the combination of observational data which are reinforced by survey experiments are nothing but novel and impressive. Also, her empirical results are neatly presented, hence making the book a must-read.