Publication type
Journal Article
Series Number
Authors
Publication date
June 20, 2025
Summary:
Mental health, like physical health, represents an important resource for participating in politics. We bring new insights from six surveys from five different countries (Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States) that combine diversified questions on mental health problems and political participation. Unlike previous research on depression, we find only limited evidence for the Resource Hypothesis that mental health problems reduce political participation, except in the case of voting and only in some samples. Instead, we find mixed evidence that mental health problems and their comorbidity (experiencing multiple problems) are associated with increased political participation. Our study leads us to more questions than answers: are the measures available in public opinion surveys appropriate for the task? Do general survey samples adequately capture people with mental disorders? And is the assumption that poor mental health reduces political participation wrong?
Published in
Politics and the Life Sciences
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1017/pls.2025.10004
ISSN
07309384
Subjects
Notes
Online Early
Open Access
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Association for Politics and the Life Sciences
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
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