The Place For Inequality Analysis

“The Place for Inequality: Non-participation in the American Polity” is an article that explores the possible reasons for the linkage between increasing economic inequality and the lack of political participation within the lower and middle classes. The thesis of this article is to “[draw] individual differences and societal developments into a single account of structured behavior” regarding the aforementioned trend of lack of political activity within those of lower incomes and how increasing economic inequality has affected this. (Soss, Jacobs 96) In the article, Joe Soss and Lawrence R. Jacobs obtained all of their data from previous studies. A large amount of their data came from the U.S. Census Bureau and the Federal Reserve which is …show more content…
They divide the plausible causes of lack of political activity into several major categories including: policy, political, and community. Within policy they are able to use the evidence they had collected to give a clear argument of the power of welfare and other government assistance in the participation of lower income Americans. Also, with political they are able to clearly demonstrate how wealthy contributions and party polarization caused many Americans to be ignored by the major parties and candidates. And with community they are able to show how “concentration effects” (122) lead to many people in low income neighborhoods would collectively lack to participate and have no outside influence leading them to act. Their evidence does have a problem though in that it is largely empirical rather than numerical. As mentioned before, their evidence is based on the work of other sources and the authors do not mention how many of the conclusions they drew from other articles were reached. It is understood that the articles are reliable and the conclusions are sound and supported but, the authors do not provide any way to know with certainty how the conclusions they are presenting as fact were reached. However, overall, the authors do support their thesis very well with the evidence they …show more content…
Jacobs is a mostly well written overview of the growing economic inequality and its effect on political participation of the lower and middle classes. Political Scientists should read the article, as it provides several good points, but be weary of it as it provides mostly empirical evidence and has a clearly stated bias in its conclusion. However, this does not deter from the fact that those of lower income do not participate nearly as much as those who large incomes, therefore the article is worth reading but should expanded upon by the reading of other articles on the same topic, as they my present more numerical evidence and provide less of a clearly stated