Russel Sage Foundation

Author: Christopher Ojeda

Scholars have long attributed the income-participation gap-which is the observation that the rich participate in politics more than the poor-to income-based differences in the resources, recruitment, mobilization, and psychology underpinning political behavior. I argue that these explanations require a longer time horizon than the empirical evidence permits. Education, for example, typically ends in young adulthood and so cannot logically mediate the effect of income on participation in late adulthood. To resolve this temporal problem, I propose that there are two income-participation gaps: one based on current economic status and another on childhood economic history. I situate this argument in a developmental framework and present evidence for it using six studies. The results, while mixed at times, indicate that there are two gaps, that the size of each gap changes over the life course, and that their joint effect creates a larger income-participation gap than estimated by prior research.