Abstract
A common thought is that political participation must be equally high among different social groups – such as women and men or various socioeconomic groups – in order for political equality to be fulfilled. This approach has, however, been criticized for being too crude. Several scholars argue that one must also study the reasons behind group differences in participation. If these differences are explained by differences in resources – and not political motivation – political equality is threatened, as this points to structural inequalities determining participatory differences. Using this perspective, I make an empirical investigation into the political participation of women and men in Sweden, a country known for unusually far-reaching political gender equality. In spite of this, men devote more of their political activities to areas of production, such as questions relating to working life, and I find that this difference may be explained by a male advantage in political resources (civic skills, primarily). The conclusion is that political equality has not yet been fully realized between women and men in Sweden. Hence, future studies should consider separating between different policy areas, when empirically evaluating the status of political equality. Quantitative methods are used in the empirical analyses.
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Notes
CVM has been successfully used by many researchers in order to empirically explain differences in political participation (see for instance Verba et al, 1995; Barkan, 2004). However, its purpose is not to evaluate the state of political equality. It is in this latter case that the division of resource and motivation factors becomes crucial (the two different perspectives exist in the work of Verba and his colleagues, see Verba, 1996 and Verba et al, 1995).
The prerequisite is that the individual believes that he or she has at least some influence over the outcome (cf. Nagel, 1987, Chapter 3), as the paradox can be written as: U=P × B−C where U is the utility of participation, P the probability that the individual when participating will affect the outcome, B the benefit of the desired outcome and C the costs associated with participating. In brief, the apparent paradox concerns that most citizens are politically active, at least sometimes, even though all participation comes at a cost and individual opportunities to affect the outcome are very small.
Naturally, the concept of motivation can be operationalized in many different ways. For this article, several motivational factors have been tested but not found to explain gender differences in participation, such as interest in politics, political party identification, political efficacy, political knowledge and various types of participation norms.
In spite of this the impact of free time has been empirically examined here (results not shown). The analyses showed that it does not explain any gender differences in participation.
Nonresponse was somewhat higher among the elderly, immigrants and city dwellers, but the nonresponse was not so high as to lead to any appreciable systematic measurement errors (Esaiasson and Westholm, 2006). The Citizenship Survey was carried out under the management of Jan Teorell and Anders Westholm and funded by the former Swedish Council for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences and the former Swedish Council for Social Research.
The Citizenship Survey also includes questions related to child care, but only parents with children in the home were asked these questions, making n low in these analyses and therefore it is difficult to determine the statistical significance of the results. Still, analyses were performed for the child-care area (the results are not shown) and the results resemblance to a large extent those for the health-care area.
I have also performed analyses using dependent variables that take into account how many different types of activities the respondent had performed in the respective policy area. The analyses, performed with both conventional linear regression analysis and ordered logit analysis, produced results similar to those presented here. However, these more refined variables are extremely skewed, as few individuals had performed more than one activity. I have therefore chosen to present the analyses with the dichotomous dependent variables.
The various types of political activities are: engaging in political party work and contacting of politicians, civil servants, clubs or organizations, a lawyer/legal authority or the mass media; furthermore, whether one during the last year had been asked to do any of the following (with the aim of influencing society): wear or post a campaign symbol, sign a petition, participate in a demonstration (other than First of May marches), participate in a boycott (of certain goods for instance), make a monetary donation, take part in a strike, raise money, work in a action group, work in another organization, participate in illegal protest activity or other activity.
The effect of gender is statistically significant in Model 1 at only a 90 per cent level of significance. However, the resource hypothesis was subjected to a rather stringent test here; for instance, as pointed out above engagement in voluntary associations is included as a control variable although often theoretically regarded as a form of social capital (it should then be counted as a resource factor instead of a control factor). Further analysis from that approach (not shown) shows that the effect of gender is statistically significant at the level of 95 per cent if isolated only for age and class (and not engagement in voluntary associations).
The effect of income is positive and statistically significant if civic skills, recruitment and associational activities are excluded from the model (which is a more reasonable model if the purpose is solely to examine the effect of income and education). In the same analysis, education shows a positive although not statistically significant coefficient (analysis not shown).
In Adman (2008), a study based on panel data analysis, it is questioned whether political participation is really affected by the practice of civic skills in the arena of working life (practice in associational life, however, seems to have an effect, according to this study).
It may appear to be a shortcoming that only one motivational factor was included in the analyses. However, given the motivation/resource approach, the key was to investigate whether or not participation differences are explained by central resource factors. As the resource factors should mainly precede the motivational factors in the causal chain, the lack of additional motivational factors should have no significant impact on the overall conclusions (but see the discussion on self-selection that follows in the text above).
Another potential methodological problem has to do with the causal relationships between political participation and certain explanatory factors. With regard to motivational factors and recruitment, the effect is likely to be reciprocal. However, as participation differences are explained primarily by other factors, this methodological problem should not have any appreciable effect on the overall conclusions.
The various types of associations are: sports clubs, outdoor activities clubs, youth clubs, environmental organizations, peace organizations, humanitarian aid/human rights organizations, charity/social-welfare organizations, anti-alcohol organizations, associations for the disabled/medical patients, pensioners’ associations, lodges or fraternal societies, trade unions, business or employers’ organizations, farmers’ organizations, investment/shareholders’ clubs, residential/housing associations, consumers’ organizations/consumers’ cooperatives, other cooperatives, parents’ associations, cultural/music/dance/theatre associations, other hobby clubs, automobile organizations, immigrant organizations, groups/organizations within the national church of Sweden, other religious/church organizations, women's organizations, voluntary defence associations, local action groups, groups/associations for international issues or other clubs or organizations.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Christina Bergqvist, Jörgen Hermansson, Ann-Cathrine Jungar, Gunnar Myrberg, Per Strömblad, Pär Zetterberg and two anonymous reviewers, for valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. Funding was provided by the Swedish Research Council.
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Adman, P. Investigating political equality: The example of gender and political participation in Sweden. Acta Polit 46, 380–399 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2011.2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2011.2