Executive Sumamry: "Unequal at the Starting Line: Creating Participatory Inequalities across Generations and Among Groups" by Nancy Burns, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Sidney Verba

Adult Americans are quite unequal in occupation and income; that is hardly news. Furthermore, they are not equal at the starting line; parents are able to pass on class status to their offspring and, thus, socio-economic stratification persists from generation to generation. Though the transmission of socio-economic status from parent to child is far from perfect, transmission of socio-economic advantage across generations results in persistent class differences that have roots in the past.

            In this paper we consider inequalities in political participation. We are particularly interested in group inequalities in political activity. Political competition usually involves contention between groups and the outcomes usually impose costs and confer benefits on groups. It matters not only whether individual inequalities in participation are passed from generation to generation, but whether intergenerational processes result in participatory inequalities across politically-relevant categories of individuals. Thus, we focus on the roots of group differences in political participation in the legacy of the past. In considering how participatory inequalities among groups are shaped across generations, we consider three bases of political contestation—perhaps, the most significant bases of contestation in America—class, race or ethnicity, and gender. We ask: to what extent are class, racial or ethnic, and gender differences in political activity the result of where group members were early in life? We find that the participatory differences among racial and ethnic groups can be fully explained—and the participation gap between men and women can be partially explained—by group differences in socio-economic status (SES).

            Our analysis shows that processes by which initial class background influences subsequent political activity operate across individuals regardless of their other demographic characteristics. When we explored how these processes intersect with participatory inequalities among groups—between women and men and among African Americans, Latinos, and Anglo Whites—we found a complex and interesting pattern. The intergenerational transmission of educational advantage plays a very different role in the creation of disparities in activity between groups defined by their gender than in the creation of participatory differences among groups defined by race or ethnicity. The gender gap in political participation is not a function of initial class differences. Men and women are born randomly into families across the SES spectrum. That men’s average levels of educational attainment have traditionally surpassed women’s reflects social processes and individual choices during childhood and adolescence—rather than any systematic difference in parents’ education. In sharp contrast, group differences in parent socio-economic characteristics figure importantly in explaining participatory inequalities among Anglo Whites, Blacks, and Latinos. Class background plays a role from the beginning in the family of origin. For African Americans and Latinos, the deficit in participation is handed down from generation to generation; for women, it is created anew throughout the life cycle.