Inequality of political opportunity: Measures and explanations

The purpose of the present project is to study the distribution of political participation in advanced democracies in general – and in Sweden in particular – from the standpoint of equality of opportunity.

That is, we will adopt the analytical and methodological tools from the equality of opportunity literature in economics to measure the total extent to which the observed variation in political participation among citizens is due to various circumstantial characteristics beyond individual control, such as an individual’s sex, family background, or ethnicity.

An important advantage of shifting the focus from the explanatory effect of individual background variables, such as sex and ethnicity, to the total impact of a broad set of circumstance factors is that this will put us in a much better position to assess the overall state of democracy in a country.

In the second part of the project we will examine various contextual and institutional conditions that may exacerbate or ameliorate the degree of equality of political opportunity in a society.In the project we will utilize two main data sources.

First, we will employ detailed data from Swedish population registers to study the degree of equality of opportunity in voting and political candidacy during the last century.

Second, we will complement the analyses of Swedish administrative data with information from various survey sources to extend the analyses to a broader set of political participatory acts and countries.