Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Participation inequality
Summary
In social sciences, participation inequality consists of difference between levels of participation of various groups in certain activities. Common examples include:
differing levels of participation in democratic, electoral politics, by social class, race, gender, etc.
differing levels of participation in online communities as described by Jakob Nielsen.
In politics, participation inequality typically affects "the kinds of individuals, such as the young, the poor and those with little formal education" who tend to not take the initiative to participate in electoral and related events. State enumeration, such as was done in Canada before the implementation of the National Register of Electors in 1996, "worked to augment voter turnout among all segments of society and thus mitigated a natural tendency toward participation inequality in electoral politics".
Political participation inequality refers to how populations differ in political participation when sorted by various characteristics. Most often these groupings are by social class, race, gender, or ethnicity. Widespread political participation inequality often describes when various groups are left out of the political sphere or excluded from various political rights.
Participation inequality usually helps political theorists determine where democracies fail or when political institutions are not democratically responsive. When political systems are too unequal in terms of political participation, it most generally means that there is a breakdown in the ability of all citizens to politically deliberate to distribute various scarce resources, implement comprehensive public policy, or enact needed social reforms. Nations with high amounts of participation inequality are generally characterized as undemocratic although there are certain nations, like India, where low participation inequality has not helped the democratic responsiveness of Indian institutions.
In his 1971 paper Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition, Robert Dahl provided a basic framework to evaluate democracies or polyarchies (nearly/almost full democracies) based on their participation inequality.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.