Does poor health cause political passivity even in a Scandinavian welfare state? Investigating the impact of self-rated health using Swedish panel data

Healthy citizens, healthy democracies? A review of the literature

“…This is easy to understand: if there is a health bias in turnout, governments may have less incentive to respond to the needs of those in poor health. Multiple studies, spanning different welfare regimes and electoral rules, have confirmed the association between health and turnout in the UK (Denny and Doyle, 2007a;Rapeli et al, 2020), Canada (Couture and Breux, 2017), Ireland (Denny and Doyle, 2007b), the US (Burden et al, 2017;Pacheco and Fletcher, 2015;Peterson, 1991), the Nordic countries (Adman, 2020;Lahtinen et al, 2017;Mattila et al, 2017Söderlund and Rapeli, 2015), and across Europe (Mattila et al, 2013(Mattila et al, , 2017Stockemer and Rapp, 2019;Wass et al, 2017). Some studies have even found that the effect rivals that of education (Burden et al, 2017) and social class (Gagné et al, 2020).…”

“…In Finland and Sweden, older adults in poor health proved less likely to engage in protest activities, such as signing petitions, boycotting, and demonstrating, but no less likely to undertake ‘influencing activities,’ such as contacting politicians, appealing decisions, and writing letters to the press (Nygård and Jakobsson, 2013). However, Mattila (2020) showed that people in poor health were more likely to engage in non-institutional forms of participation in Finland, and Adman (2020) concluded that poor health stimulates contact and protest activities in Sweden.…”

“…In principle, panel data should show whether changes in health precede changes in political behavior. Longitudinal studies in the UK and Sweden have shown that declining health reduces the propensity to vote (Adman, 2020; Rapeli et al, 2020), but using panel data to address possible reverse causality comes with its own methodological challenges (Leszczensky and Wolbring, 2022). Another solution is to employ instrumental variables by selecting an exogenous variable that is strongly correlated with health, but does not directly influence political behavior and is unrelated to unobservables that could affect the latter.…”