The Income Gap in Voting: Moderating Effects of Income Inequality and Clientelism.

ABSTRACT: We investigated whether income gaps in voting turnout vary with country-level economic inequality, and whether this pattern differs between wealthier and less-wealthy countries. Moreover, we investigated whether the prevalence of clientelism was the underlying mechanism that accounts for the presumed negative interaction between relative income and economic inequality at lower levels of national wealth per capita. The harmonised PolPart dataset, combining cross-national surveys from 66 countries and 292 country-years, including 510,184 individuals, was analysed using multilevel logistic regression models. We found that the positive effect of relative income on voting was weaker at higher levels of economic inequality, independent of the level of national wealth. Although clientelism partia

SUBMITTER: Huijsmans T 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9433354 | biostudies-literature | 2022

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature