Does high unemployment mobilize the unemployed? Evidence using Swedish register data

• This article contributes to recent scholarship on the effects of economic hardship on political participation, and particularly on the issue of how individual and contextual effects interact. More specifically, we study whether the effect of individual unemployment on turnout depends on the level of aggregate unemployment. In contrast to most existing researchers on this topic, we argue that contextual unemployment may reinforce the negative effects of individual unemployment. We also contend that previous studies have not adequately considered how the composition of the unemployed population differs across times of high and low unemployment. Our empirical approach uses state-of-the-art Swedish register panel data, which gives us good opportunities to control for the selection of the unemployed population over the business cycle. We find that once this problem of dynamic selection is taken into account, the negative effect of individual unemployment on electoral turnout is actually stronger in high unemployment contexts.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap -- Statsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science -- Political Science (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

unemployment

economic crises

labor markets

methodology

political sociology

Statskunskap

Political Science

Publikations- och innehållstyp

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