Ballots and Backyards: The Influence of Objective and Perceived Income Mobility on Voter Turnout

Democracies rely on broad-based political participation, yet voter turnout has declined across many established democracies in recent decades. One prominent explanation focuses on intergenerational income mobility: when citizens perceive that the economic system no longer offers fair opportunities for advancement, they may withdraw from political life. However, existing research has largely emphasized egotropic concerns — that is, how individuals’ own mobility prospects affect their political participation. We know far less about whether and how perceptions of mobility in one’s local community shape turnout, despite growing evidence that neighborhood contexts influence political behavior. We argue that individuals’ local contexts — and how economic mobility is observed and perceived within them — play an important role in shaping political engagement, and that the effects of mobility may differ depending on whether it is measured objectively or subjectively. To test this argument, we examine how both objective intergenerational income mobility and subjective perceptions of mobility in local neighborhoods relate to voter turnout in Switzerland. Our research design combines uniquely fine-grained administrative data with original survey data, linking validated individual turnout records to census-based measures of actual mobility and to neighborhood-level perceptions of opportunity in the Canton of Zurich. Our preliminary results reveal a striking asymmetry: objective intergenerational mobility is weakly related to turnout, whereas subjective perceptions of local mobility opportunities are strongly associated with participation. These findings suggest that sociotropic assessments — shared perceptions and narratives about opportunity in one’s community — rather than actual mobility rates, are central to understanding how economic conditions translate into political engagement.