Democracy's Unsolved Dilemma: Education and Increasing Turnout Inequality

In many democracies around the world there are differences in voter turnout according to educational attainment (Verba et al. 1978, Gallego 2015), and furthermore, there is evidence of an increase in this phenomenon in post-industrial societies (Armingeon & Schädel, 2015; Dassonneville 2017; Dalton 2017). Thus, political inequality remains more than ever ‘democracy’s unsolved dilemma’ (Lijphart 1998). Extensive cross-country comparative work establishes the contextual conditions that increase or decrease turnout inequality (Gallego, 2010, 2015; Dalton 2017). However, these are mostly institutional settings that have not changed significantly over the last 60 years. Therefore, these factors cannot explain the time-varying turnout inequality and one question remains to be answered: What changes in post-industrial democracies can account for the rise in turnout inequality? Drawing on relative power theory (Goodin & Dryzek 1980), I suggest that the expansion of education may help explain the rise in unequal turnout. I argue that when average levels of education are higher, the less educated may feel powerless the face of an ever-growing group of better educated citizens with greater political leverage, as recent work has found unequal responsiveness based on education level (Elsässer et al. 2021; Schakel & Van der Pas 2021; Lupu & Tirado Castro 2023). In this context, the less educated are demobilising and, consequently, turnout inequality increases. Relying on an extensive database - covering 15 Western democracies over more than 50 years - and using an interactive multilevel model, I show that average years of education successfully help explain variation in turnout inequality. I also confirm that unequal turnout is increasing in most of the countries analysed, which is consistent with previous findings.