Beyond Equal Rights: Equality of Opportunity in Political Participation

• Published date: 01 September 2020
• Author: Paul Hufe,Andreas Peichl
• Date: 01 September 2020
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/roiw.12442

© 2019 The Authors. Review of Income and Wealth published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of

International Association for Research in Income and Wealth

477

BEYOND EQUAL RIGHTS: EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IN

POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

by Paul Hufe

ifo Munich and University of Munich

AND

andreas PeicHl*

ifo Munich, University of Munich, IZA and CESifo

While it is well documented that political participation is stratified by socioeconomic characteristics,

it is an open question how this finding bears on the evaluation of the democratic process with respect

to its fairness. In this paper, we draw on the analytical tools developed in the equality-of-opportunity

literature to answer this question. We investigate to what extent differential political participation is

determined by factors that lie beyond individual control (circumstances) rather than being the result

of individual effort. Using rich panel data from the United States, we indeed find a lack of political

opportunity for the types with the most disadvantaged circumstances. Opportunity shortages tend to

complement each other across different forms of participation and persist over time. Family character-

istics and psychological conditions during childhood emanate as the strongest determinants of political

opportunities.

JEL Codes: D39, D63, D72

Keywords: equality of opportunity, political participation

1. introduction

Rousseau (1978) supposed that in well-run states, “everyone rushes to the

assemblies.” Judging by this standard, Western democracies are in increasingly bad

shape as the drop in voter participation is a shared tendency in these countries

(OECD, 2015). For example, in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, almost 100

Note: This paper has benefited from discussions with Zareh Asatryan, Daniel Hopp, John Roemer,

Alain Trannoy, and Eric Plutzer. We are also grateful to audiences at SMYE Lisbon, LAGV Aix-en-

Provence, Canazei Winter School, SSSI Bonn, and seminar participants in Mannheim and at Duke

University for many useful comments and suggestions. This research uses data from Add Health, a

program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S.

Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and funded

by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and

Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations.

Special acknowledgment is due to Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the orig-

inal design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health

website (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhe alth). No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921

for this analysis.

*Correspondence to: Andreas Peichl, ifo Munich, Poschingerstr. 5, 81679 Munich, Germany

(peichl@ifo.de).

Review of Income and Wealth

Series 66, Number 3, September 2020

DOI: 10.1111/roiw.12442

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creat ive Commo ns Attri bution License, which

permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly

cited.

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Review of Income and Wealth, Series 66, Number 3, September 2020

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© 2019 The Authors. Review of Income and Wealth published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of

International Association for Research in Income and Wealth

million individuals of the voting-age population did not turn out to vote on elec-

tion day (McDonald, 2018).

In this work, we analyze the individual determinants of political participa-

tion from an equal-opportunity perspective. Drawing on rich panel data from the

United States (U.S.), we investigate to what extent political participation is driven

by circumstances—individual characteristics that are beyond individual control—

as opposed to individual effort. Prominent examples of the former factors include

biological characteristics such as sex and race, the socioeconomic status of the

parental household, or the characteristics of the neighborhood in which children

were raised. In line with the seminal contribution by Roemer (1998), we interpret

participation differences across circumstance types as indicative for the presence of

unequal opportunities in political participation.

Thereby, our paper contributes to two strands of the literature. First, research

on (the lack of) political participation has a long-standing tradition in the social

sciences. In particular, recent empirical contributions analyze the effects of voting

costs (Campante and Chor, 2012; Charles and Stephens, 2013), the influence of

exposure to different media (Falck et al., 2014; DellaVigna and Kaplan, 2007),

and election closeness (Bursztyn et al., 2017; Gerber et al., 2017), as well as insti-

tutional features of the political process such as compulsory-voting laws (Hoffman

et al., 2017) and technologies of vote collection (Funk, 2010; Fujiwara, 2015).

Furthermore, various individual characteristics are widely accepted as fundamen-

tal drivers of political participation. Among others, these include a person’s socio-

economic status (Dee, 2004; Milligan et al., 2004) as well as preference and belief

sets (Cantoni et al., 2016). While the previous literature has analyzed a vast array

of participation determinants in their own right, none of the studies has analyzed

political participation from an equal-opportunity perspective—a gap that we fill

in this paper.

Second, the literature on equality of opportunity has largely focused on

income (Chetty et al., 2014a; Ferreira and Gignoux, 2011; Bourguignon et al.,

2007), education (Chetty et al., 2014b; Ferreira and Gignoux, 2014), and health

(Rosa Dias, 2009; Fleurbaey and Schokkaert, 2009). In this work, we widen the

scope of this strand of the literature by considering political participation as a

new outcome dimension. In particular, we focus on seven forms of participation:

(i) voter registration for the 2000 presidential election, (ii) vote casting in the 2000

presidential election, (iii) contact with officials, (iv) participation in rallies or

marches, (v) membership in political organizations, (vi) volunteering in civic orga-

nizations, and lastly (vii) the vote frequency in statewide and local elections. Our

second contribution to the equality-of-opportunity literature is that, in addition to

rather traditional circumstance characteristics such as race or parental socioeco-

nomic status, this is the first work that expands the set of circumstance variables

by genotype information. By virtue of the fact that genes are fixed, they represent

a pure measure of biological inheritance and thus should be of particular interest

in the estimation of equality of opportunity.

Our results show that factors beyond individual control are strong determi-

nants of political participation along each of these dimensions—especially with

respect to contacts with officials, participation in rallies and marches, and the

membership in political organizations. In these three dimensions we find that more

Review of Income and Wealth, Series 66, Number 3, September 2020

479

© 2019 The Authors. Review of Income and Wealth published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of

International Association for Research in Income and Wealth

than 50 percent of the observed variation in participation must be attributed to

differences in opportunity sets across circumstance types. In the remaining dimen-

sions this statistic is around 20 percent—a result comparable to other outcome

dimensions such as income or tertiary education. It is noteworthy that opportunity

disadvantages do not set off each other across different modes of participation.

Disadvantages in either activity are positively correlated with opportunity disad-

vantages in other forms of political participation. Furthermore, our results sug-

gest that opportunity disadvantages persist over time. Family circumstances and

psychological dispositions as a child consistently exert the strongest influence on

unequal opportunities across all forms of political participation. We find that gen-

otype information has a statistically significant impact on inequality of opportuni-

ties. The influence of genes, however, is small in magnitude in comparison with the

previously mentioned circumstance groups.

The analysis of political participation from an equal-opportunity perspective

provides a number of important insights. First, fairness assessments of people are

highly sensitive to the process according to which an outcome comes about. In par-

ticular, they oppose inequalities that are not rooted in individual effort but exog-

enous circumstances (Cappelen et al., 2007; Alesina et  al., 2018). Analogously,

it is a key question for the legitimacy of democratic outcomes whether political

non-participation is self-inflicted instead of being attributable to factors beyond

individual control (Brady et al., 2015). To be sure, in the U.S. the right to vote is

unrestricted—as is the right to free speech and association. Yet our results sug-

gest that the take-up of these liberties is strongly stratified by the circumstances in

which people grow up. Thus, while there is formal (or de jure) equality of opportu-

nity for political participation, there remains inequality in the effective (or de facto)

opportunity to exercise one’s voice in the democratic process.

Second, by means of participating in the political process, the constituents

of a jurisdiction can influence policies, the consequences of which are fed back

to themselves. Thus, political participation has an instrumental function in fos-

tering the citizens’ interests. From that perspective, non-participation alone would

be unproblematic if the preferences of the participating population were entirely

congruent with the abstaining fraction. However, this assumption seems to be

contradicted by a variety of findings; for example, that “[i]n particular, women,

youth and African-Americans appear to have stronger preferences for redistribu-

tion” (Alesina and Giuliano, 2011). Henceforth, if political activity was stratified

by these very same circumstance characteristics—that is, sex, age, and race—the

participation bias would reinforce existing inequalities by discounting the call for

increased redistribution. Further evidence to this effect is provided by Cascio and

Washington (2013), who show that the enfranchisement of blacks through the

Voting Rights Act from 1965 led to larger turnouts in black communities as well

as larger transfers from state governments to the affected communities. Similarly,

Miller (2008) shows how the health outcomes of children have benefited from pol-

icies adopted as a result of female suffrage. While the previous examples refer to

the revocation of de jure opportunity disadvantages to exercise democratic rights,

Fujiwara (2015) analyzes the consequences of a de facto enfranchisement in a set-

ting of universal suffrage. In particular, he shows that a reduction of voting costs