CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2009
| Author | Sirinic, Daniela |
|---|---|
| Title | Isocratic Quest: Patterns of Participatory Inequality in New and Old European Democracies |
| Summary | The present thesis attempts to develop further tools for critical assessment of the quality of existing democratic regimes. As the countries the countries with longer democratic tradition are regarded as having a higher quality than the neo democracies, the main goal of this thesis will be to assess the QoD in the countries with different length of democratic experience, that is Netherlands, Portugal, Poland and Slovenia. The assessment is conducted by describing their differences according to the inequalities in political participation. More precisely, this is done by using participatory distortion, the measure of political inequality developed by Verba, Brady and Schlozman (1995). Empirical analysis is conducted on the European Social Survey Module III dataset. The model is developed to test the input of participatory process by relating the types of political participation to the politically relevant characteristics (age, gender, education and income). Results of the analysis reveal following patterns of participatory distortion: women are found to be under-represented across most of the types of participation in all of the countries analyzed; age is found to be the category with significantly more distortions than gender and significant distortions were found for two age groups: young and old. Furthermore, it has been found that the low educated individuals are the most under-represented category of all of the categories analyzed.Second part of the empirical analysis introduces overall measure of participatory distortion calculated for every country from Logged Representation Scale. Ireland was found to be the country with least disproportionate participatory public and therefore the one that has achieved the highest level of political equality among the countries analyzed. |
| Supervisor | Schneider, Carsten |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2009/sirinic_daniela.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University