James Tyer

Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Fitzgerald, Keith

Keywords

Economics, United States, Inequality, Elections

Area of Concentration

Political Science

Abstract

This analysis attempts to create a causal model of the effect that economic inequality has on voter participation in the Unites States. Drawing from current relevant research, this model shows that economic inequality affects voting and other participatory propensities on multiple levels, and across various time frames, all of which produce independent effects. First, economic inequality produces disparities in income, and creates more poor individuals or poorer individuals, producing individual-level participatory declines, and an overall decline on aggregate. Second, economic inequality happens simultaneously with job restructuring, producing a structural reduction in participation from the change in the nature of the high-SES work, and by reducing more individuals to service-industry jobs, where there are lower participatory propensities. Third, in response to lower state funding for schools as a result of economic inequality, making these schools more vulnerable to market mechanisms in the need to secure external funding, and in response to market demand shifts due to occupational restructuring, educational disparities increase at the structural level, and even those of high SES who attend the better schools are less likely to learn the voter and participatory-conducive skills and attitudes that schools typically inculcate, reducing participation again at the structural level. These inequalities in resources and attitudes, as well as the overall decline in civic-oriented skills and attitudes, generate social distrust and reduce social capital, producing a macro-level independent effect. These mechanisms all produce a shift in the participatory infrastructure, where not only is the voter disparity more pronounced along SES lines, but also the relative value of voting declines compared with other non-voting forms of participation, especially campaign contributions, and the opportunity to participate is even further stratified. This produces negative feedback for voters of low and high SES alike, where neither have much of an incentive to vote, reducing voting further. This bias in policy input then, finally, further generates more inequality, producing a system-reinforcing effect. The researcher then lists several ways to reduce the effect of the mechanistic relationship, and to generate greater voter and participatory propensity.

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