Explaining Socioeconomic Disparities in Turnout: Health as a Mediator in the SES-Voting Relationship

The substantial gap in electoral participation between upper and lower socioeconomic status groups has long been a vexing problem for modern democracies and one that demands explanation. Following separate bodies of scholarship that suggest (1) socioeconomic disadvantage diminishes health and (2) poor health has a demobilizing effect on turnout, this paper proposes that health serves as a pathway through which social inequality manifests in disparities in voting. This paper tests this hypothesis by analyzing validated voter data using structural equation modeling to decompose the associations between SES indicators and turnout through health. This analysis yields evidence that health mediates the relationship between SES and electoral participation, though this mediation differs across socioeconomic indicators. These results suggest that the relative electoral inactivity of the disadvantaged is partly due to the demobilizing effects of diminished health and that health plays a role in transforming social inequalities into political ones.Master of Art