Addressing political inequality: the role of formal education and information campaigns

One of the biggest political challenges facing modern Western democracies is political inequality. The gap between the political haves and the have nots is pervasive and even widening. Across developed democracies, socio-economically disadvantaged citizens participate less in politics compared to their more advantaged counterparts. From democratic theory to contemporary public policies, education has been identified as one of the main ways to ensure adequate preparation of democratic citizens and to promote equality of opportunity in politics. However, empirical evidence on the actual democratic benefits of formal and voter education remains mixed. It is the central argument of this dissertation that education has a causal effect on political participation, and that this effect might not be general, but conditional. Indeed, there are strong theoretical and empirical reasons to believe that the democratic benefits of formal education and voter education will vary across social groups. So the question addressed by this dissertation is: can formal education and voter education campaigns close the participation gap between advantaged and disadvantaged citizens? In the first article, I investigate the causal and conditional effect of formal education on electoral participation in Canada. I use a propensity score weighting analysis with a longitudinal dataset to evaluate whether the effect of university education on electoral participation varies for individuals coming from advantaged or disadvantaged family backgrounds. The findings show that education has a causal effect on electoral participation, for both the advantaged and the disadvantaged. While the participation-enhancing benefits of education tend to be larger for disadvantaged youth, university education does not close the participation gap between socio-economically advantaged and disadvantaged individuals. In the other two articles, I examine a new type of web information campaign, Voting Aid Applications (VAA). So in the second article, I investigate the effects of a VAA on the political engagement and electoral participation of citizens with varying levels of education. Building on political behaviour research, communication theory, and social psychology, I test alternative hypotheses about the differential effects of VAAs with an innovative randomized field experiment design. The results confirm that the VAA can inform and engage the public. However there is no significant effect on electoral participation. While higher educated users of the VAA learn most from this voting app', the lower educated users become more interested in the elections and more motivated to vote. Thus, across political outcomes, the VAA both decreases and increases political inequalities between privileged and underprivileged citizens. In the third article, I specifically examine whether VAAs influence citizens' electoral decisions. I use a randomized field experiment to evaluate the effect of the Vote Compass on users' electoral preferences during the 2014 Quebec provincial election. The results show that users of the VAA are more likely to form an electoral preference, but this is only the case among thirty-year olds, higher educated, and more politically interested users. At the same time, using a VAA does not affect preferences on Election Day and only impacts party preferences of voters in the short term: the politically uninterested and the older users are more likely to change their party preferences, whereas the thirty-year olds and the politically interested users are less likely to change their initial party preference. Furthermore, the type of recommendation received from the tool does not affect users' vote choice. So contrary to what some have feared, VAAs do not lead to vote switching.

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