Pathways from Poverty to Participation

The existing evidence is clear that the poor are far less politically engaged than are more affluent Americans. Data recently reported by the Census Bureau vividly illustrates this relationship: individuals with a family income of $25,000 or less were half as likely to vote in the last election as those with an income of more than $75,000. When education is the measure of socioeconomic status, only 38% of those with less than a high school education voted compared to 75% of those with a bachelor’s degree or greater. Although this relationship is well-documented, what is not as well understood is why the poor are so much less politically engaged than the more affluent. One explanation suggests that the poor are influenced by the same factors as everyone else. Given their low levels of income and education, the poor participate at predictably low levels. While certainly a part of the story, an alternative view suggests that there are important qualitative differences brought about by severe economic deprivation, and these differences are important for understanding decreased political participation.

This is the main thesis of the project proposed by Professor Eric Plutzer and Christopher Ojeda at The Pennsylvania State University. They argue that there are a number of correlates of severe economic hardship that affect political participation and they propose several specific pathways likely to mediate the poverty-participation relationship. Each pathway hinges on one or more intervening variables – specifically, physical and mental health, housing and food security, and exposure to crime – all of which have steep income gradients at the lower end of the distribution and have been linked to lower political participation. Although they do not claim that these are the only mediating variables of importance, Plutzer and Ojeda chose these specifically for the strength of their empirical relationships with both income and political participation. They also suggest that these particular pathways are likely to be promising targets of effective public policy efforts. Finally, they also propose to examine whether some individuals are more immune to the effects of poverty than others. They suggest that measures of personal competence may be an indicator of resilience which can help some lower-SES individuals to overcome the barriers to political engagement associated with economic hardship, and they will incorporate a scaled measure of competence in their multivariate models.

Plutzer and Ojeda draw from a diverse set of longitudinal data sources with complementary strengths. These primarily include the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the Children of the NLSY, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Additional analyses will be conducted with data drawn from sources such as the Educational Longitudinal Survey, the Fragile Families Study, and cross-sectional data from the National Election Studies and the General Social Survey to carry out robustness checks and expand on the findings from the longitudinal analyses. These data are particularly useful for focusing their analyses on the adolescent years and first few decades of adulthood when habits of political participation are formed. Because they are particularly interested in the poor, the use of longitudinal data will also allow them to assess competing claims about whether chronic poverty is more salient than an individual’s current poverty status for understanding political engagement.