The Internet and Civic Engagement

Based on a survey, analyzes how socioeconomic status and other demographics correlate with online and offline political and civic engagement. Explores suggestions that younger generations' political use of social media may alter such patterns

Unequal at the Starting Line: Creating Participatory Inequalities across Generations and among Groups

Governmen

The use of music in Mutual Recovery: a qualitative pilot study

Mutual Recovery involves caregivers and their clients mutually participating in artistic endeavours to foster resilience in both parties. A qualitative enquiry into the use of group music making (referred to as a ‘Music Jam’) between both the caregivers and clients at a residential treatment facility for adults with developmental disabilities and Schizophrenia was conducted. The purpose of this study was to examine whether shared musical endeavours enjoyed therapeutic and resilience building utility for both the caregivers and clients. A focus group was conducted in which comments were collected and transcribed for qualitative analysis. Themes of enhanced respect and equality among clients for the caregivers, and intrapersonal connectedness and enhanced feelings of community emerged during analysis. Both parties expressed recurrent themes of humility, mutual respect and overall enjoyment. Mutual Recovery practices where caregivers and their clients play music outside of therapeutic settings are an effective means by which resiliency and connectedness can be enhanced in all participants. To this end, other forms of Mutual Recovery deserve greater investigation in order to better examine whether these practices are worth implementing in larger and more varied formats

Who participates in local government? Evidence from meeting minutes

Scholars and policymakers have highlighted institutions that enable community participation as a potential buffer against existing political inequalities. Yet these venues may bias policy discussions in favor of an unrepresentative group of individuals. To explore who participates, we compile a novel data set by coding thousands of instances of citizens speaking at planning and zoning board meetings concerning housing development. We match individuals to a voter file to investigate local political participation in housing and development policy. We find that individuals who are older, male, longtime residents, voters in local elections, and homeowners are significantly more likely to participate in these meetings. These individuals overwhelmingly (and to a much greater degree than the general public) oppose new housing construction. These participatory inequalities have important policy implications and may be contributing to rising housing costs.Accepted manuscrip

Inequality Perceptions, Preferences Conducive to Redistribution, and the Conditioning Role of Social Position

Inequality poses one of the biggest challenges of our time. It is not self-correcting in the sense that citizens demand more redistributive measures in light of rising inequality, which recent studies suggest may be due to the fact that citizens' perceptions of inequality diverge from objective levels. Moreover, it is not the latter, but the former, which are related to preferences conducive to redistribution. However, the nascent literature on inequality perceptions has, so far, not accounted for the role of subjective position in society. The paper advances the argument that the relationship between inequality perceptions and preferences towards redistribution is conditional on the subjective position of respondents. To that end, I analyze comprehensive survey data on inequality perceptions from the social inequality module of the International Social Survey Programme (1992,1999, and 2009). Results show that inequality perceptions are associated with preferences conducive to redistribution particularly among those perceived to be at the top of the social ladder. Gaining a better understanding of inequality perceptions contributes to comprehending the absence self-correcting inequality

The Political Consequences of Outsider Labour Market Status in the United States: A Micro-level Study

This paper contributes to recent research that seeks to understand the political consequences of ‘outsider’ labour market status. There is an emerging consensus that labour market outsiders have systematically different policy preferences and display systematically different political behavior to securely employed ‘insiders’ in Europe. Yet the political consequences of outsider status in the United States are less clear. They may be expected to differ from those that have been documented in the European context, because 1) the US is characterized by low employment protection of insiders, and 2) there is evidence that Americans are more reluctant than Europeans to hold governments responsible for personal economic hardship. We therefore use the General Social Survey to examine how outsider labour market status is related to voting behavior and to social policy preferences in the United States. We find that the concept of ‘labour market outsider’ - as conventionally operationalized - holds little explanatory power in the American context. Disaggregating the outsider category, our results suggest that the political consequences of outsider labour market status may be contingent on individual beliefs about government responsibility

Electoral Punishment and Protest Politics in Times of Crisis

This chapter links the political consequences of the Great Recession on protest and electoral politics. The economic voting literature offers important insights on how and under what conditions economic crises play out in the short run. However, it tends to ignore the closely connected dynamics of opposition in the electoral and protest arena. Therefore, this chapter combines the literature on economic voting with social movement research. It argues that economic protests act as a ‘signalling mechanism’ by attributing blame to decision-makers and by highlighting the political dimension of deteriorating economic conditions. Ultimately, massive protest mobilization should thus amplify the impact of economic hardship on electoral punishment. The empirical analysis to study this relationship combines the data on protest with a dataset of electoral outcomes in thirty European countries from 2000 to 2015. The results indicate that the dynamics of economic protests and electoral punishment are closely related and that protests contributed to the destabilisation of European party systems during the Great Recession