Poverty & Participation: The Role of Social Ties Across Individuals and Contexts

• In Event: Local Governance, Service Provision and Social Cohesion in the Arab World

Abstract

Research finds that socioeconomic status is associated with differing levels of participation in social and political activities. In this paper, we seek to answer a series of questions relating to socioeconomic status and mobilization for community initiatives. How do socioeconomic disparities among individuals versus the distribution of these disparities within communities affect propensities for collective action? How do people of differing socioeconomic backgrounds mobilize others in their neighborhood to participate in community initiatives? How does social pressure affect participation and does its effect vary across members of differing socioeconomic backgrounds? To answer these questions, we employ a mixed-methods research design comprising of surveys and a field experiment in the developing democracy of Tunisia, where both socioeconomic inequality and the need for community initiatives to fill gaps in public service provision are high. Given that the vast majority of Tunisians cite waste collection as a very serious problem in nationally representative surveys, we focus in our study on organizing clean-up events within neighborhoods of varying socioeconomic compositions. The experimental manipulation primes social pressure from neighbors to participate (versus no additional pressure to the control group). This research design will allow us to observe behaviors surrounding community collective action among individuals of differing socioeconomic backgrounds and in neighborhoods of differing socioeconomic compositions. Furthermore, we will causally test the effects of social pressure on participation in community activities. We expect poorer individuals to be more likely to engage in neighborhood clean-up events, and, in particular so, when being asked by their neighbors to join. Yet this effect will also be conditional upon neighborhood composition such that we expect poorer individuals to be more likely to participate when living in neighborhoods in which they constitute the socioeconomic majority than in socioeconomically mixed neighborhoods and neighborhoods in which the wealthy dominate. We hypothesize that social ties are stronger among poorer individuals in homogeneously poor communities. Consequently, we expect that poorer individuals and particularly those who are members of a majority-poor neighborhood will be more susceptible to social pressure to participate than individuals who are themselves wealthier or who are living in socioeconomically mixed neighborhoods. We aim to contribute to the literature on political and civic participation by observing individual- and community-level differences in community participation as well as by experimentally testing the effect of social pressure on compliance.

Keywords: Waste Collection Initiatives, Civic Participation, Social Density, Poverty, Social Context, Tunisia

Authors

• Kristen Kao, University of Gothenburg

• Prisca Jöst, University of Konstanz