Democracy, when boiled down to one person, one vote , explicitly demands equality . When examining who votes and otherwise participates, however, we all too frequently encounter an unequal reality: although modern democracies espouse the ideal of political equality , economic inequality severely constrains an egalitarian exercise of political rights. Both the level and the distribution of political participation and democratic engagement vary widely across countries, leaving us wondering how some countries have achieved greater political equality than others, and, more specifically, what role does the welfare state play in shaping democratic citizenship ? Can the welfare state , in addressing income -based inequality, also alleviate the related political inequalities and thereby encourage political equality ? These are the main questions I examine in this book.
Beyond the importance of individual resources, personality characteristics, or political socialization, we must also consider the influence of public policy on political engagement. This idea, known as the policy feedback approach, emphasizes that policies impact recipients much like formal political institutions doâthey too can transmit norms and impose rules and regulationsâand can thereby transform politics itself. Why should we expect welfare policies to impact democratic citizenship ? First, they confer people with material benefits, that is, greater resources enhance participatory capacity. Second, social spending can increase political saliency and relevancy of politics for peopleâs everyday lives. Third, strong welfare commitments send the message that citizensâ interests are protected and valued, thereby enhancing feelings of democratic support and political efficacy .
In this book, I contribute to the extant literature on democratic political engagement by examining the ways in which welfare state policies impact individual political behaviors and attitudes. By looking at broader sets of policies over a large and diverse group of countries, this study aims to bridge the gap identified in the policy feedback literature regarding the effects of policies on mass publics. While there are numerous works that examine the effects of specific policies for smaller target groups in single countries, fewer studies have applied the policy feedback framework to larger populations. More specifically, I comparatively apply many of the ideas that have been investigated primarily in the United States to a diverse international setting. In doing so, I expand the literature that tends to quite narrowly focus on the role of resources for political engagement and systematically investigate the variety of ways in which the welfare state context may modify this relationship. I examine the varied responses democracies have developed to address social questions and how these responses shape the quality of democracy in terms of democratic citizenship .
Although social stratification represents a mainstay in contemporary social science research, analyses of democratic citizenship and political inequality are often restricted to more theoretical and philosophical accounts and are not subject to systematic empirical analysis. And while many have examined the consequences of economic inequality on voter turnout , finding, for example, that a higher Gini coefficientâa measure of income inequality âis associated with lower turnout , particularly among the less advantaged, these studies tell us very little about the mechanisms behind these relationships. That resources play a role for political participation is by no means a new finding; people with more money or education or better networks participate far more frequently than people with fewer. But what is it about inequality that is so detrimental to political participation and democratic support ? By turning the attention to public policies, things with which people actually come into contact or have personal experiences, I argue that we can get closer to understanding just why inequality âor its mirror, a generous welfare state âaffects political behaviors and attitudes, in terms of both the overall level and the equality of the distribution.
In order for citizens to be interested and involved in democracy, they must witness that their governments actually do something to serve their interests. The fact that in many countries we find democratic citizenship to remain very much tied to socioeconomic status tells us that perhaps democracy could and should deliver more. This study aims to make two main contributions: first, it empirically examines the relationship between welfare states and democratic citizenship in advanced democracies. While the relationship between income inequality and political participation has been relatively well documented, far fewer studies approach political inequality from the perspective of democratic quality, comparing what democracies deliver to their citizens and how citizens respond to such policy offerings. Drawing on the policy feedback literature, I comparatively examine how specific policy foci impact the ways in which individuals behave toward and think about their governments. Second, this book goes beyond the procedural and purely institutional accounts of political participation and looks directly at what a democracy is able to deliver. At the end of their introduction to the edited volume Assessing the Quality of Democracy , Larry Diamond and Leonardo Morlino (2005) ask whether a quality democracy provides quality results, such as citizen satisfaction, and whether improvements in quality can bolster peopleâs attitudes toward and views of democracy. This book aims to provide some answers to questions such as these. The goal is not to be able to say what the perfect democracy looks like but rather to highlight how democratic citizenship can be fostered through public policy.
Overview of This Book
In the chapter to follow, I introduce the concept of democratic citizenship , its determinants, and correlates. Next, I provide an overview of the literature on welfare states and their effects on individual behaviors and attitudes. The main theoretical frameâthe policy feedback approachâis then introduced. This perspective states that policies can affect citizens much like formal institutions doâthey too can shape identities and foster participation. The effects policies have on their citizens âfeed back into political systems, producing spirals in which groupsâ participatory and policy advantages (or disadvantages) accrue. Citizensâ relationships with government, and their experiences at the hand of government policy, help determine their participation levels and in turn, subsequent policy outcomes â (Campbell 2011, 2). That policies themselves can play a role in shaping the level and distribution of democratic engagement gives us good reason to study them, given their impact on the fundamental mechanisms of the democratic process. Furthermore, since the distribution of societal goods constitutes a basic function of democratic governments, who gets what, how much, and how, as determined by the design of policies, can weigh heavily on citizensâ capabilities and motivation for political participation.
The empirical chapters begin with a discussion of the analytical, theoretical, and epistemological issues of welfare state measurement and a discussion of the statistical methods I employ. Due to the importance that measurements remain consistent with theoretical concepts, I posit that it is not appropriate to examine the welfare state through the lens of aggregate social expenditures . As many others have argued (e.g., Castles 2008; Esping-Andersen 1990), public social spending varies with regard to outcome depending on its object. For reasons I elaborate on in the empirical chapter, I look at spending on working-age adults and families when linking the welfare state to the democratic citizenship . In short, this category of spending is arguably most closely aligned to what Esping-Andersen (1990) refers to as the theoretical core of the welfare state .
After introducing the measurement of the welfare state employed in this study and discussing the use of multilevel regression as a tool for analyzing the effects of a policy context on the actions and attitudes of individuals in a given country, I move on to the empirical analyses of welfare spending on working-age adults and families on four central aspects of democratic citizenship : electoral participation, interest in politics, political trust , and satisfaction with democracy . The individual-level data for these analyses come from the World Values Survey (WVS), the European Social Survey (ESS), and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES).
What is revealed from these quantitative analyses is that, controlling for both individual attributes and country-level factors, welfare spending on working-age adults and families is indeed associated with higher voter turnout , greater interest in politics, greater political trust , and satisfaction with democracy . The results of the initial multilevel models provide support for a direct effect of the welfare state on democratic citizenship , that is, we can observe higher levels of these democratic citizenship traits in countries, which place a larger policy...