Doctoral Dissertation Research: The Rising Political Participation of Senior Citizens: The Role of the American Welfare State

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Assertions have long been made in the comparative politics literature of political science that social movements and interest groups shape welfare state outcomes. In the current era of fiscal constraint and welfare state retrenchment, elected politicians seek to support programs championed by vocal interest groups and politically active beneficiaries while cutting programs that benefit the politically quiescent. While plausible, such assertions have not been backed by evidence. This Doctoral Dissertation research project demonstrates, in the American case, that senior citizens, through their high rates of political participation, have been able to perpetuate their welfare state benefits while groups at lower levels of participation, such as the poor, have suffered program cuts. Thus, the political participation of senior citizens constrains governmental decision-making and shapes welfare state outcomes because elected officials fear retribution from this vigilant and active group. This dissertation project will employs a particularly valuable dataset, a series of 211 national cross-sectional surveys conducted by the Roper Organization ten times per year from September, 1973, through October, 1994. Each of the 211 surveys contains a battery of 12 participation questions, most of which are unavailable in other longitudinal surveys. This project produces a concatenated dataset of the twelve participatory acts and available political and social covariates, a unique resource of 211 nearly monthly readings of political participation in America. When publicly released, this dataset will provide a valuable addition to the political participation survey repertoire. For this project, the dataset is crucial for three reasons: it contains participatory acts like petition-signing and letter-writing unavailable in any other longitudinal dataset; encompasses the time period of interest, when seniors overtook nonseniors in their rates of participation as evidenced in other data; and, is the only monthly participation data available, which will show that senior participation is responsive to specific threats to welfare state programs. This Doctoral Dissertation research project promises to produce and interesting and important dataset for use by other scholars.