Inequality, Justice Beliefs and Political Participation in Latin America

A series of studies consistently show that socioeconomic status is related to higher rates of electoral participation. Such association implies a transmission of economic inequality into political inequality, threatening ideals of equality and even the legitimacy of the political system. Nevertheless, there are several elements that could affect this link and that deserve further attention. First, is not clear whether this patterns holds accross other participation forms, for instance protest participation. Secondly, beliefs about how goods and rewards should be distributed in society might play a role in this realm, since those with a strongest preference for an egalitarian distribution could be more willing to participate in order to pressure for their demands. Thirdly, country level indicators such as the inequality level could affect the link between status and participation i.e. in societies with higher inequality the link between status and participation would be higher.  The present study aims at addressing these issues in Latin America, the region of the world with the highest inequality indexes. A series of multilevel models are estimated based on data from the Latin American Public Opinion Project 2012 (N=28,021;  countries=18), which in this last wave has a special focus on distribution and inequality. Preliminary results show that status variables such as the educational level are positively related with both electoral and protest participation. Furthermore, those with a strongest belief in redistribution depict a higher probability to participate. Nevertheless, the role of inequality as context level variable on participation does not show a clear direction in the analysis, which leads to discuss about considering further macro indicators (for instance democratic indexes) as well as to attend to countries’ particular characteristics that could affect a stronger or weaker link between inequality, justice beliefs and participation. (Project funded by FONDECYT grant 11121203)