Unemployment and voter turnout revisited: A brief note

Cebula, Richard J.

doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2017.06.003

Cited by 21 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…The empirical support for the two hypotheses, however, is mixed. Studies that focus on the effects of individual unemployment typically point in the direction of the withdrawal hypothesis (Gallego, 2007;Emmenegger et al, 2015;Kern et al, 2015); however, those which study the relationship between overall unemployment and aggregate participation rates more often find support for the mobilization hypothesis (Lim and Sander, 2013;Burden and Wichowsky, 2014;Cebula, 2017).…”

Section: Theory and Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Second, most previous research on how contextual unemployment conditions the effect of individual unemployment uses American or European data in which contextual unemployment is measured at the state or country level (e.g. Kern et al, 2015;Cebula, 2017;Aytac¸et al, 2018;Kurer et al, 2019;Incantalupo, 2015). However, such aggregate measures are rather crude indicators of the contextual unemployment experienced by voters, since economic conditions typically vary considerably within states and countries with millions of residents.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

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Does high unemployment mobilize the unemployed? Evidence using Swedish register data

Österman

Lindgren

2021

Socio-Economic Review

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This article contributes to recent scholarship on the effects of economic hardship on political participation, and particularly on the issue of how individual and contextual effects interact. More specifically, we study whether the effect of individual unemployment on turnout depends on the level of aggregate unemployment. In contrast to most existing researchers on this topic, we argue that contextual unemployment may reinforce the negative effects of individual unemployment. We also contend that previous studies have not adequately considered how the composition of the unemployed population differs across times of high and low unemployment. Our empirical approach uses state-of-the-art Swedish register panel data, which gives us good opportunities to control for the selection of the unemployed population over the business cycle. We find that once this problem of dynamic selection is taken into account, the negative effect of individual unemployment on electoral turnout is actually stronger in high unemployment contexts.

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Section: Theory and Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Does high unemployment mobilize the unemployed? Evidence using Swedish register data

Österman

Lindgren

2021

Socio-Economic Review

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“…Individuals facing foreclosure are less likely to vote (Shah and Wichowsky 2019). However, other studies, particularly analyses of state-level unemployment data, find that unemployment is related to increased turnout and participation (Burden and Wichowsky 2014; Cebula 2017). Some work suggests that economic shocks demobilize through a mechanism of reduced trust, whereas other findings propose a linkage between blame attribution and behavior (Levin, Sinclair, and Alvarez 2016).…”

Section: Negative Economic Shocks and Resiliencementioning

confidence: 96%

Crisis, Resilience, and Civic Engagement: Pandemic-Era Census Completion

Denny¹

2021

Perspect. polit.

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How do economic shocks and financial resilience shape civic engagement, especially for the economically insecure? I turn to the early months of the coronavirus pandemic for insights. In April 2020, with more than 23 million adults unemployed, the US government asked residents to participate in the constitutionally mandated decennial census. I test how variations in income shocks from the shutdown and sources of financial resilience predict disparities in census completion, a civic act designed to minimize participation barriers. First, I use nationally representative survey data to demonstrate that policies that protect the economically vulnerable from the full impacts of economic shocks also predict higher census completion rates. Then, I use Google Trends data to show that high unemployment search volume interacted with low resilience to predict depressed census completion. Findings shed light on how economic crises can widen participation gaps—with representation and resource consequences—and how policies that lessen acute economic shocks may reduce participation disparities.

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“…At the aggregate level, unemployment has proven to be a good indicator of the social condition of the respective unit of analysis (Schäfer, 2015; Schwarz, 2012). A high unemployment rate affects the working citizens in the district and depresses their willingness to vote through social interdependence, and fosters an atmosphere of rejection of the political system (Cebula, 2017). Accordingly, we will use unemployment as a proxy for the latent variable ‘socioeconomic background’ of city districts.…”

Section: Research Design: Voter Turnout In City Districts Across Europementioning

confidence: 99%

Political equality without social equality? Social distortion of voter turnout in the European elections 2019 across nine European capitals

Haußner

Kaeding

2020

Research & Politics

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Although we know a lot about why citizens vote or abstain in elections, the social inequality of low turnout in European elections has attracted little attention. This paper focuses on voter turnout in the last 2019 European elections and examines whether low voter turnout in second-order elections is automatically associated with high social inequality, using Tingsten’s law as inspiration. By contrasting a second-order election with other high and low turnout elections, the paper deepens our understanding of the mechanisms behind low turnout in European elections. Following the argument that the macrolevel social imbalances of low turnout can best be analysed at the neighbourhood level, we develop a small-scale analysis of turnout across nine capitals of the European Union for the 2019 European Parliament (election and perform a regression model with interaction effects to examine the effects between different types of elections. Our results do not find differences in the effect of neighbourhoods’ social context on voter turnout between these elections. Although turnout in all cities is socially biased across all types of elections, jeopardising the ideal of political equality across Europe, we find no evidence that the 2019 European Parliament elections were more socially unequal than other elections – regardless of their second-order nature.

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Unemployment and voter turnout revisited: A brief note

Cited by 21 publications

References 12 publications

Does high unemployment mobilize the unemployed? Evidence using Swedish register data

Does high unemployment mobilize the unemployed? Evidence using Swedish register data

Crisis, Resilience, and Civic Engagement: Pandemic-Era Census Completion

Political equality without social equality? Social distortion of voter turnout in the European elections 2019 across nine European capitals

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