Conference: Disability and political participation

About the conference

Understanding the patterns and determinants of electoral participation is an important part of understanding contemporary representative democracy. Systematic differences, where some distinguishable social groups participate far less than others, are particularly important to
understand. The political scientist Arend Lijphart said that “unequal participation spells unequal influence”, and by extension implied that democratic procedures risk failing in their promise to consider the interests of all groups of citizens equally. Existing research on political participation covers a wide range of social differentiation factors, including gender, race, class, and age. However, research on disabilities and political participation is still comparatively scarce within political science.

The aim of the conference

With the aim of contributing to our understanding of the obstacles and opportunities for political participation among citizens with disabilities, we gather researchers with an interest in this topic to gather to a pre-read workshop in Uppsala, Sweden. Our ambition is to collect the contributions in a special issue with the potential to become a point of reference for future research on disabilities and political participation.

Contributions

We welcome both empirical and theoretical papers, on both physical and cognitive/intellectual disabilities. Empirical papers can be single case studies or comparative analyses, and they can use both quantitative and qualitative research designs. While our primary focus is on understanding variation in citizens’ participation as voters, we are also interested in papers that focus on participation as candidates or as elected representatives. In addition, we welcome papers that analyze differences (e.g. based on gender, class, etc.) within a group of individuals with specific disabilities.