Mobilizing the Poor: Poverty and Participation in European Elections

Over the last three decades, many European countries have devolved extensive competencies to subnational and local governments. This paper assesses how this trend has influenced patterns of political participation. Drawing on a unique dataset of 25,900 local elections across 15 European countries, the paper demonstrates that the expected relationship between poverty and electoral participation is reversed within contexts where local governments exercise discretion over service delivery. Although low-income citizens are significantly less likely to participate in national elections, the opposite pattern holds in local electoral contests, where low-income citizens participate at substantially higher rates than their wealthier counterparts. Drawing on local survey data, I demonstrate that the increased participation of the poor is tightly linked to the active mobilization efforts of local governments. By fusing service delivery with politics, decentralization substantially lowers the costs associated with mobilizing poor voters. As a result, local governments that choose to direct expenditures towards the margins can expect to receive outsized electoral returns. This finding has important policy implications given extant trends towards local discretion over tax and redistributive policy.