Unequal Cities, Unequal Participation: The Effect of Income Inequality on Civic Engagement

Abstract

Civic participation is a touchstone of American government, yet it has declined steadily over the past 50 years. Alongside changes in the relationship between American citizens and their government has been a stark increase in the levels of income and wealth concentration. While there is strong evidence that income inequality drives down participation at the national level, there have been fewer studies on the effects for local governments. This article studies the relationship between participation in departmental policy making and income inequality at the local level across the United States in a sample of small and mid-sized cities. When accounting for aspects of the government's structure, local department culture, and community demographics, income inequality has a significant, though mixed, effect on civic participation. While changes in a community's income inequality diminish the likelihood of citizens participating in government decision making, the present level of income inequality correlates with higher rates of engagement.

Local exposure to inequality among the poor increases support for taxing the rich

“…Because subjective socioeconomic status depends to a great extent on features of an individual's local context, studies conducted at relatively high levels of aggregation may mask important variation, and our evidence appears to support this idea (Velez and Wong, 2017). Most observational studies of local inequality use measures at relatively high levels of geographic aggregation, such as U.S. states (Franko, 2016(Franko, , 2017, counties (Newman et al, 2015;Cheung and Lucas, 2016;Solt et al, 2017;Newman et al, 2018), municipalities (Phillips, 2017;van Holm, 2019), or zip codes (Johnston and Newman, 2016;Page and Goldstein, 2016). One exception is Minkoff and Lyons (2017), who use smaller spatial aggregations, but only consider New York City.…”

“…For example, participants may find it uncomfortable or stressful to stop for any petition in the presence of an expensive car, leading to lower response rates under treatment irrespective of effects on their preferences. Second, observational evidence suggests that inequality suppresses civic and political participation and engagement among the poor (Alesina and La Ferrara, 2000;Solt, 2008;Soss and Jacobs, 2009;Solt, 2010;Anderson and Beramendi, 2012;van Holm, 2019), while experimental evidence suggests that upward social comparisons can suppress political efficacy (Condon and Wichowsky, 2020) and even change people's willingness to accurately report their incomes on surveys (Bush and Prather, 2019).…”

Foresight as a Tool for the Planning and Implementation of Visions for Smart City Development

“…Together with a growing popularity of the smart city concept, there appear numerous new projects based on innovative technologies helping cities to solve the emerging problems of technical infrastructure [1,2], pollution and environmental protection [3,4], waste management [5,6], spatial development [7,8], logistics and urban transport [9,10], ageing society [11,12], poverty [13,14] and low levels of involvement of residents in public affairs [15,16]. After all, many of them fail to satisfy their initial objectives due to the fact that they are not adapted to the complexity, diversity and uncertainty characterising contemporary cities [17].…”

Smart city concept in the light of the literature review

“…• environmental pollution (Caparros-Midwood et al, 2019;Alam et al, 2019;Munoz-Pandiella et al, 2018;Kosheleva et al, 2018); • urban logistics (Nataraj et al, 2019;Firdausiyah et al, 2019;Bjørgen et al, 2019;Cleophas et al, 2019;Faramehr et al, 2019;Mesjasz-Lech, 2014;Tomaszewska & Florea, 2018); • technical infrastructure (Petrova & Prodromidou, 2019;Faramehr et al, 2019;Pham & Phan, 2018;Juget & Ryckewaert, 2018); • waste management (Bugge et al, 2019;Amritha & Kumar, 2019;Dlamini et al, 2019;Scorţar et al, 2010); • aging population (Jayantha et al, 2018;Fang & Lai, 2018;Onoda, 2018;Greenfield, 2018;Jarocka & Wang, 2018); • stratification of wealth levels, areas of poverty (Muktiali, 2018;Lanjouw & Marra, 2018;Ma et al, 2018;Aguilar & López, 2016); • low level of citizen participation in the management of public affairs (Mavrodieva et al, 2019;Sou, 2019;van Holm, 2019;de Castro Pena et al, 2017). Knowing the identified challenges and the expected increase in the number of urban residents around the world, there is an increasing need for new and innovative ways to manage the complexity of urban life.…”