My research looked at how an individual’s socioeconomic background effects their political participation. The first half of this class was reading Campbell and Putnam and analyzing the possible factors for the decline of political participation in the US. Due to these readings, I was interested in understanding not only why people are politically engaged, but what kinds of people are politically engaged. I hypothesized that individuals with a higher socioeconomic status would be more politically active because they have better access to resources and possibly have more incentive—especially because Putnam tells us that better educated people are more likely to be politically engaged. I think this knowledge is important because we constantly study how and why people choose to be politically engaged in this country and my research provides one piece of the puzzle.
My first figure is a graph that measures average level of political engagement by education. Political engagement is measured here as a scale measuring involvement in various types of political activity (voting, discussing politics, campaign work, wearing a button, donating to a candidate, etc.). The blue line represents people who are college educated, the pink line shows people who have a high school level education, and the green line measures people with a grade school level education. The graph shows that the higher the level of education (at least college educated), the more political engaged a person is.
My next figure presents te results of a logit regression esimating the effect of an individual’s level of education on their likelihood of working on a political campaign. This model controls for race/ethnicity, age, gender, and survey year. These results indicate that the more highly educated a person is, and the higher their income, the more likely they are to work on a campaign. This raises the possibility that the class of people involved in political campaigns have economic interests that are different from those less well-off.