Unequal and Unrepresented: Political Inequality and the People’s Voice in the New Gilded Age

Author

Kay Lehman Schlozman, Henry E Brady

Content Type

Journal Article

Journal

Political Science Quarterly

Volume

134

Issue Number

1

Publication Date

Spring 2019

Institution

Academy of Political Science

Abstract

Who participates in American democracy? In particular, is it those with high levels of resources who most often vote, protest, contact elected officials, and discuss politics with friends? How unequal is political participation? Political scientists Kay Lehman Schlozman, Henry E. Brady, and Sidney Verba have contributed important answers to these questions over the past few decades. In their first book, Voice and Equality (1995) these scholars traced associations between resource possession and political participation, finding extensive evidence of inequalities in political voice. In their second book, The Unheavenly Chorus (2012), the authors reiterated and updated the analyses of the first. The authors also extended Voice and Equality in a number of ways, primarily by examining organizational-level as well as individual-level participatory inequalities, and by assessing the likely efficacy of various reform strategies.

Topic

International Affairs

Political Geography

Global Focus