Voice and Inequality: Poverty and Political Participation in Latin American Democracies [Hardcover]

Understanding who participates in politics and in which kinds of activities is central to understanding how democracies work. This book offers the first large-scale empirical analysis of political participation in 18 Latin American countries, with a focus on understanding the political behavior of the region's poorest citizens. Poor people in Latin America vote, protest and contact government officials at surprisingly high levels, approaching or exceeding levels of activism of individuals with significantly more resources and schooling. To explain this puzzling finding, we argue that key institutions of democracy including civil society, political parties, and competitive party systems are especially important for understanding the activism of poorer citizens and, as a result, have profound effects on inequalities in political participation.The first large-scale study of political participation in eighteen Latin American democracies, focusing on the political participation of the region's poorest citizens.Political regimes in Latin America have a long history of excluding poor people from politics. Today, the region's democracies survive in contexts that are still marked by deep poverty and some of the world's most severe socioeconomic inequalities. Keeping socioeconomic inequality from spilling over into political inequality is one of the core challenges facing these young democracies. In Voice and Inequality, Carew Boulding and Claudio Holzner offer the first large-scale empirical analysis of political participation in Latin America. They find that in recent years, most (but not all) countries in the region have achieved near equality of participation across wealth groups, and in some cases poor people participate more than wealthier individuals. How can this be, given the long history of excluding poor people from the political arena in Latin America?Boulding and Holzner argue that key institutions of democracy, namely civil society, political pal£