Demographic Variation in Political Voice Across 22 Countries: A Cross-National Analysis

This paper describes how political voice differs across demographic characteristics, particularly age, gender, marital status, employment status, religious service attendance, education, immigration status, religion, and race/ethnicity in various cultures. We apply random effects meta-analysis to a diverse and international dataset of approximately 202,898 individuals from 22 countries in the Global Flourishing Study to examine the relationships between political voice and demographic characteristics. We find that political voice is generally higher among adults age 18-24, males, both married and single individuals, students, those with more education, those who attend religious services at least once a week, and those born in the country in which they reside. Some outlying results in specific countries suggest a need for further investigation of the sociocultural determinants of political voice among demographics in certain countries. Our findings both confirm and complicate recent research on political voice, showing the importance not only of commonly studied determinants like income and education, but also less appreciated factors like religious belief and service attendance, marital status, and employment. Our study shows that political voice is shaped by a complex array of factors operating in varying ways depending on context, while also pointing to several determinants that seem to prevail across cultures and contexts.