As the portion of the foreign-born population continues to grow across the European Union, gaps in overall political participation between immigrants and natives persist. This is a cause for...Show moreAs the portion of the foreign-born population continues to grow across the European Union, gaps in overall political participation between immigrants and natives persist. This is a cause for concern to European democracies, specifically regarding their representativeness of the entirety of the population that constitutes them and that they are meant to serve. While scholars have focused on more conventional forms of political participation, this research aims to specifically focus on protests as a non-conventional form of political participation while taking both experienced and perceived discrimination as the main motivators and major determinants of this type of political behavior. Using data from the Survey on Minorities and Discrimination in EU conducted by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights in 2016, this paper argues that both the experience and perception of discrimination are positively related to participation in protest behaviors amongst citizens of immigrant origin. This paper uses a binary logistic regression with experienced and perceived discrimination as predictor variables, and participation in protest as the response variable, while controlling for six key factors: age, gender, income, generation of immigration, interest in politics, and education. Countries were also used as control variables to counter potential biases in the results from the clustering that often occurs with the use of survey data.Show less
There has been a simultaneous rise in income inequality and ideological polarization across old and new democracies in past decades. Although a large body of literature has been dedicated to...Show moreThere has been a simultaneous rise in income inequality and ideological polarization across old and new democracies in past decades. Although a large body of literature has been dedicated to exploring the relationship between the two factors in old democracies, new democracies have been largely neglected. In this thesis, I examine the effect of income inequality on mass ideological polarization in a sample of 36 new democracies. Using data from seven waves of the World Values Survey, I conduct several statistical analyses to test the hypothesis that higher levels of inequality are associated with higher levels of polarization. Although the study provides no robust evidence to support the hypothesized relationship, it shows that globalization and unemployment have a statistically significant effect on polarization. The study calls for further cross-national research to be conducted on the relationship between inequality and polarization in new democracies.Show less
This paper theorises whether gender-egalitarian values could be a helpful indicator in the effort of political science to explain the gender gap in political knowledge. It first develops a...Show moreThis paper theorises whether gender-egalitarian values could be a helpful indicator in the effort of political science to explain the gender gap in political knowledge. It first develops a theoretical framework based on the gendered political socialisation process. Based on country-level data from around the World Value Survey, it examines the relationship between gender-egalitarian values and the political knowledge of respondents in the CSES survey. Overall, it offers compelling insight into descriptive representation’s potential and limitations to understand the discrepancies between men and women in political knowledge.Show less
