Withering participation in ‘left behind’ places? The effect of community deprivation on individual civic, work and political membership

Since, the 1960s, deindustrialization has left some communities in deprivation and this has changed the character of political involvement in these places. The aim of this paper is to understand how individuals’ local community experiences of deprivation shape the way they participate in political associations. More specifically, we aim to answer the question: How does increasing community deprivation affect individuals’ political and civic involvement? To test this, we exploit the spatial and temporal richness of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (UKHLS). With this data, we follow individual exposure to changing community deprivation over around 10 years (2010 to 2019) at a very granular community level where, on average, 3,000 people live (LSOAs). We measure community deprivation using the Indices of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) provided by the ONS as well as measures of subjective neighbourhood social cohesion through the Buckner index. For our outcome, we measure a multi-dimensional measure of political participation, which considers membership in national political parties, membership in trade unions and membership in residential associations. This multi-dimensional measure allows us to consider political participation at three different levels, the national, the workplace and the neighbourhood of residence. We use both longitudinal regression models and structural equation modelling (SEM) to demonstrate that while the direct effect of community deprivation has a positive effect on political participation, it has an indirect negative effect which is mediated by the extend of social cohesion in the community. Together, our results highlight the importance of considering community-level deprivation and the crucial role of social cohesion but for political participation as well.