How Inequality Produces Participation Gaps in China: Evidence from a Megacity

• In Event: Participation and Urban Policy: Case Studies from around the World

Abstract

As economic inequality has been exacerbated significantly worldwide since the mid-1970s, whether economic inequality breeds political inequality has attracted massive attention among scholars and practitioners. So far, there has been an increasing number of studies investigating whether and how economic gaps lead to participation gaps. Although with noticeable achievements, these studies primarily treat economic inequality as an individual-level phenomenon by using income, wealth, and SES as the major measurements. This approach, however, tends to overlook the distributive nature of economic inequality. This article seeks to fill this gap by exploring how unequal economic distribution affects political participation at the aggregate level. Instead of using survey data like most previous studies, this article collects a new dataset measuring political participation: citizens’ requests from the 12345 Citizens’ Service Hotline of a mega-city in China. Combined with pre-owned housing prices, government inputs, and geographic information, this article employs spatial analysis techniques to reveal the spatial structure of participation. This article proposes three dimensions of spatial economic inequality: the level of wealth, within-inequality, and cross-inequality. Results show that the richness of a community alone does not significantly contribute to higher political participation. In contrast, within-inequality, measuring the unevenness within a community, leads to more involvement of citizens in public affairs; more specifically, a more economically divided community is more likely to witness higher participation. Cross-inequality also affects citizens’ behavior. In particular, when it is surrounded by a rich community, citizens living in that area are more likely to participate. Mechanisms behind the above aggregate-level findings are also explored. As an attempt to interrogate the spatial structure of participation, this article offers new explanations with empirical evidence showing how economic inequality impact politics spatially.

Authors

• Yu Yan, Beijing Normal University

• Tianguang Meng, Tsinghua University