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Highly educated citizens vote at much lower rates than less educated citizens in some countries. By contrast, electoral participation exhibits no such bias in other countries as diverse as Spain, Denmark, and South Korea. This book describes the levels of unequal participation in thirty-six countries worldwide, examines possible causes of this phenomenon, and discusses its consequences. Aina Gallego illustrates how electoral procedures, party and media systems, unionization, and income inequality impact unequal participation through an original combination of cross-national survey data and survey experiments

Well-educated citizens vote more frequently than the poorly educated in some countries, including the USA. However, in many countries, no such differences are observed. One classical explanation of the presence or absence of this inequality in voting is that the strength of left-wing forces sharpens or reduces it. An alternative explanation is that some institutional arrangements and contextual features disproportionately affect the voter participation of some individuals depending on their resources, thus shaping turnout inequality. These theories are tested using multilevel modeling with data from 28 advanced industrial democracies. Compulsory voting reduces inequalities because under this system quasi-universal turnout is achieved. In addition, the poorly educated vote more frequently when the voting procedure is easy and when there are few political parties, thus reducing turnout inequality. However, strong left-wing parties and trade unions are not associated with more equal turnout. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]

Recent research has found that voter turnout is declining in most advanced industrial countries. The trend is driven by generational replacement because the age cohorts that entered the electorate at the end of the twentieth century are voting at lower than expected rates. In North American countries, the decline is also concentrated among the poorly educated. This article examines the relative contribution of period, life‐cycle, generational and educational effects on changes in electoral participation over the last four decades in Sweden, Norway and Germany with individual‐level data. Turnout decline is partly driven by generational change in the countries observed as the literature suggests. Additionally, there is also a clear socio‐economic correlate. Most strikingly, poorly educated persons of all age groups are increasingly failing to vote in Germany. The results suggest that the causes of the long‐term evolution are multidimensional and the relative consequences vary across countries. The debate about turnout decline and its possible remedies has to take into account the fact that both members of new generations and citizens with low education attainment are the main targets of measures aimed at increasing turnout rates, but different actions might be required to attract each specific demographic group to the polls.

The fact that social stratification factors are closely related to different levels of political participation is a classical issue that has relevant normative as well as explanatory implications for the study of participation. However, in the shift from the industrial to the information or knowledge society some patterns in that respect may be changing. This paper explores the effect of various possible sources of inequality on political participation (gender, age, social class, education, income, ethnicity, and working status) on four political activities, using data from the European Social Survey for 22 European countries. The frequency, consistency, and the mode specific patterns of the observed differences are taken into account to discuss which of these factors can be considered genuine sources of inequality. Overall, age and education emerge as the most widespread causes of distortion, while gender, membership in minorities, and occupational variables are less clearly related to participation. In conventional activity the differences are more predictable in the direction of the disadvantage, while demonstrators can be in some respects both under- and overrepresented among disadvantaged citizens. Finally, the fact that socio-economic inequalities in turnout are unambiguously visible in most European countries stands in sharp contrast with past research and deserves further attention.

New technologies have been a key driver of labor market change in recent decades. There are renewed concerns that technological developments in areas such as robotics and artificial intelligence will destroy jobs and create political upheaval. This article reviews the vibrant debate about the economic consequences of recent technological change and then discusses research about how digitalization may affect political participation, vote choice, and policy preferences. It is increasingly well established that routine workers have been the main losers of recent technological change and disproportionately support populist parties. However, at the same time, digitalization also creates a large group of economic winners who support the political status quo. The mechanisms connecting technology-related workplace risks to political behavior and policy demands are less well understood. Voters may fail to fully comprehend the relative importance of different causes of structural economic change and misattribute blame to other factors. We conclude with a list of pressing research questions.

Honesty is one of the most valued traits in politicians. Yet, because lies often remain undiscovered, it is difficult to study if some politicians are more honest than others. This paper examines which individual characteristics are correlated with truth-telling in a controlled setting in a large sample of politicians. We designed and embedded a game that incentivizes lying with a nonmonetary method in a survey answered by 816 Spanish mayors. Mayors were first asked how interested they were in obtaining a detailed report about the survey results, and at the end of the survey, they had to flip a coin to find out whether they would be sent the report. Because the probability of heads is known, we can estimate the proportion of mayors who lied to obtain the report. We find that a large and statistically significant proportion of mayors lied. Mayors that are members of the two major political parties lied significantly more. We further find that women and men were equally likely to lie. Finally, we find a negative relationship between truth-telling and reelection in the next municipal elections, which suggests that dishonesty might help politicians survive in office.