Funded by German Research Foundation (2023-2026)

 

A large literature recognizes a strong socio-economic gradient in political involvement. Voting turnout and other forms of engaging with politics tend to be lower among the poor. While this results in an unequal representation of their voices in the political process, we still know little about the precise mechanism that contribute to political apathy among citizens with low income. The proposed project will address this gap by studying the link between socio-economic problems and political involvement in a life-course perspective. The guiding question is to what extent the link between both variables should be thought of as a direct, causal one; or whether rich and poor primarily differ in their political involvement because they make different socialization experiences in their youth and childhood.

 

Theoretically, the project builds on two core findings in previous research. First, according to the “impressionable years” hypothesis, political behaviors and orientations are comparatively malleable until early adulthood and become increasingly resilient afterwards. Socio-economic problems could thus affect political involvement at young age, but lose explanatory power during the process of habituation in prime age. Secondly, parents have been shown to influence their children through political learning and through status transmission, which contributes to participatory inequality already before voting age. The socio-economic gradient typically observed in cross-sectional data could thus be largely attributable to family background and childhood experiences. Empirically, the project makes use of large-scale panel survey data. In particular, it includes studies which survey children already at a very young age (starting at age 9). Such rarely used samples allow us to investigate a period in people’s lives where socio-economic experiences might lay (or impair) crucial foundations for growing into politics.

 

Methodologically, we employ latent growth curve modeling to study the development of political involvement over the life-course, difference-in-difference matching techniques to identify the causal effect of individual life-experiences on political involvement, and sequence analysis to discover trajectories of socio-economic problems and political involvement.

The disproportionate participation and representation of higher socio-economic groups has been identified as a major democratic challenge and research topic in political science. The project contributes to this debate with two related subprojects. Although both are located at different analytical levels and apply different methods, both ultimately inform debates about how unequal political influence across socio-economic groups transpires.

 

Project 1 studies how the socio-economic gradient in political participation comes into existence. It does so by tracing in panel data from different countries how the negative effect of economic problems unfolds from early phases of political socialization over the life course. Concretely, it seeks to establish a) the typical age at which socio-economic experiences matter the most; b) the relative weight of parental and personal socio-economic experiences and c) long-term consequences of early problems for political involvement.

 

Project 2 treats the politics of taxation as a burning lens for the disproportionate political influence of (super) rich citizens. Taxing this group would straightforwardly serve the material interests of most citizens. Why, then, are large democratic majorities so reluctant to raise taxes on increasingly concentrated incomes and wealth of this small group? The project addresses this puzzle by studying citizens’ tax preferences and how they are strategically shaped by political actors in Germany and in comparative perspective. The mixed-methods approach will combine process-tracing with elite interviews and survey experiments. Studying how a small minority shapes concrete and highly consequential policy outcomes against the apparent interest of large democratic majorities will elucidate the mechanisms underlying political inequality.

A large scientific literature studies variation in political behavior, such as voting, demonstrating, or discussing politics. The primary goal of the proposed project is to advance our theoretical understanding of why people engage in these behaviors. It does so by developing a theoretical perspective in which the motivation to express political preferences derives from emotional dynamics in mundane micro-level interactions (or ‘rituals’). The second goal is to explore whether such a perspective provides empirical added value. The core (and novel) idea is that the situational quality of social interactions has an independent causal influence on political preference - as well as on the motivation to translate them into political actions.

 

Theoretically, the project will propose a relational perspective that builds on the radical micro sociology of Randall Collins. The central intuition is that cognitions, such as political attitudes, derive their motivational force from positive emotions that can only be generated through the entrainment in rhythmically coordinated interactions. Such rituals are theorized as the key relational mechanism underlying the relative importance of any cognitive factor for political behavior. This addresses an important gap in political behavior research. Existing theories in this field offer no clear answer to the question of how voters navigate the multitude of factors that could potentially influence their political behavior. Through explicating a unified motivational basis, ritual theory can integrate many existing arguments into a more complete causal chain and achieve theory reduction. This is an important contribution to overcoming the fragmentation of existing approaches. The project’s theoretical ambition goes beyond applying Collins’s micro-theory to politics. It will also address the question of how political rituals are embedded in societal discourses and ideologies. As a result, the project will deliver an original theory that simultaneously gives justice to situational micro dynamics as well as to factors on the macro level.

 

Empirically, the project strikes a balance between a qualitative approach (that aims at an understanding of the emotional dynamics in political rituals) and causality-oriented research (that tests whether interaction quality influences the expression of preferences). It does so by using focus groups as sites for qualitative observation, quantitative measurement and experimental manipulation of political rituals. The political discussion in focus groups will provide rich material for qualitative observation, but it will also produce transcripts and footage from which para-linguistic indicators of interaction quality can be derived. The indicators, in turn, allow for a quantitative test of the theory’s prediction. Finally, by randomly varying the composition of the focus groups, the chances for ritual success can be manipulated experimentally to provide an even stronger test.