Political participation and party preferences

Nurfatima Jandarova () and Aldo Rustichini ()
Additional contact information
Nurfatima Jandarova: Tampere University, Finnish Centre of Excellence in Tax Systems Research (FIT)
Aldo Rustichini: University of Minnesota

No 25, Working Papers from Finnish Centre of Excellence in Tax Systems Research

Abstract: Political behavior of citizens includes political participation and preferences. We show with UK data that political behavior is affected by individual characteristics that are also determining educational attainment, including cognitive abilities and intelligence. Our analysis reconciles the rational choice assumption with the acquisition of costly political information, which would otherwise give only negligible benefits. We disentangle the causal pathways by identifying effects operating directly and those operating indirectly, in particular through education and income. We address the issue of endogeneity of cognitive skills using polygenic scores, and show that an important component of the causal factors is genetic.

Keywords: political participation; party preferences; human capital; intelligence; individual characteristics; polygenic score (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 I25 J31 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 58
Date: 2024-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-inv, nep-neu, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in FIT Working Paper Series, Finnish Center of Excellence in Tax Systems Research

Downloads: (external link)
https://verotutkimus.fi/verotutkimus/wp-content/up ... al-Participation.pdf First version, 2024 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fit:wpaper:25

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Finnish Centre of Excellence in Tax Systems Research Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Marjukka Hourunranta ().