The impact of life events on turnout: habitual voting does not seem to be as resistant to change as often assumed

Lauri Rapeli, Mikko Mattila, and Achillefs Papageorgiou combine two panel surveys, conducted in the UK between 1991 and 2017, to examine the impact of unemployment, retirement, changes in partnership status, moving and disability on voting. They find that turnout declines with divorce; for other life events, the impacts diverge across the voter groups they identify

Interest through necessity? : The impact of personal health on the stability of political interest in the United Kingdom

Interest in politics is a key indicator of citizens’ attitudes towards politics. Scholars disagree whether interest is a stable trait developed during adolescence, or if it changes over the life course. We hypothesise that deteriorating health can destabilise the stable sense of political interest because worsening health makes individuals more dependent on public healthcare and increase their attention to politics. Furthermore, we assume that the impact of health on interest is conditional on income as people with low incomes are dependent on public healthcare. Our results show only limited support for the first hypothesis. However, we found a negative relationship between declining health and increasing interest in the lowest income group. The results are consistent with the life-cycle theory, which presumes that important events in life have consequences even for the most endurable political attitudes. Deteriorating personal health can be a source of motivation to make persons more interested in politics.Peer reviewe

Health and Political Engagement

This title is published in Open Access with the support of the University of Helsinki.Social scientists have only recently begun to explore the link between health and political engagement. Understanding this relationship is vitally important from both a scholarly and a policy-making perspective. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive account of health and political engagement. Using both individual-level and country-level data drawn from the European Social Survey, World Values Survey and new Finnish survey data, it provides an extensive analysis of how health and political engagement are connected. It measures the impact of various health factors on a wide range of forms of political engagement and attitudes and helps shed light on the mechanisms behind the interaction between health and political engagement. This text is of key interest scholars, students and policy-makers in health, politics, and democracy, and more broadly in the social and health and medical sciences

Kansalaisten poliittinen osallistuminen ja tietämys Suomessa

Mitä parempi poliittinen tietämys, sitä aktiivisemmin suomalaiset osallistuvat politiikkaan. Tietämys ei kuitenkaan takaa oikeita valintoja, sillä politiikassa ei ole kyse vain vaihtoehtojen oikeellisuudesta vaan henkilökohtaisesta kokemuksesta

Viranhaltijoiden suhtautuminen kuntalaisosallistumisen lisäämiseen kuntahallinnossa

Public administrators’ perceptions of public engagement in local government This article is an empirical study of the attitudes of public administrators toward public engagement. Currently there is a gap in the research on the attitudes of senior public servants who are important gate-keepers for the implementation of public engagement policies. This article contributes to filling this gap in the research by using interviews with senior public servants in a Finnish municipality. The study reveals that the administrators positively value citizens and their participation. However, there are differing views concerning the relationships between the new models of civic participation and the traditional models of planning and decision-making. The results indicate that there is an ongoing cultural change within the administration. The main factors that undermine the realization of public engagement policy can be divided into legislative, organizational, individual and cultural capacities

Health and Political Engagement

Peer reviewe

Down But Not Yet Out: Depression, Political Efficacy, and Voting

Depression is one of the most common health problems in the developed world. Previous research has primarily investigated the relationship between depression and voting, largely overlooking its cognitive foundations. We turn to political efficacy as a key political attitude and precondition for political engagement. We build on research into the cognitive aspects of depression to construct arguments linking depression, political efficacy, and voting. Using cross-sectional (European Social Survey) and longitudinal (U.K. Household Longitudinal Study) data, we find evidence for a negative relationship between depression and political efficacy, that depression reduces external but not necessarily internal political efficacy, and for an accumulation effect of depression on (external) political efficacy. We also show that political efficacy is a crucial mechanism for the depression–voting gap. Our research has important implications for political representation.</p

Do Surveys Overestimate or Underestimate Socioeconomic Differences in Voter Turnout? : Evidence from Administrative Registers

Surveys generally overestimate the overall level of voter turnout in elections due to both the misreporting of voting and nonresponse. It is sometimes argued that socioeconomic differences in turnout are exaggerated in surveys because social desirability has a more pronounced effect on eligible voters in more advantaged socioeconomic positions. However, the contribution of nonresponse bias has not been taken into consideration in these assessments. Using a register-linked survey with information on the education, occupational social class, income, and voting in the 2015 Finnish parliamentary elections of both respondents and nonrespondents, this study shows that nonresponse bias leads to not only a larger overestimation of the overall level of turnout than social desirability, but also an underestimation of educational, social class, and income-related differences in the propensity to vote. Socioeconomic differences in the probability of voting in register-based data were at least two-thirds larger than differences obtained when using standard survey techniques. This finding implies that socioeconomic inequality in electoral participation is a more pressing social problem than previous evidence might indicate.Peer reviewe

Terveys ja poliittinen osallisuus : tutkimustuloksia terveyden ja poliittisen kiinnittymisen välisestä suhteesta

Non peer reviewe