Health, Wellbeing, and Democratic Citizenship: A Review and Research Agenda

Abstract

Social scientists have examined the causes and consequences of people’s engagement with politics for many decades, yet we have only just begun to understand the roles that health and wellbeing play in people’s involvement as members of the body politic. Findings from a nascent body of research suggest that health predicts people’s decision to turn out to vote and whether they feel they can have a say in political decisions more broadly, but we still lack a systematic understanding of the variable, as well as specific, ways in which health and feelings of wellbeing shape people’s interactions with political life. We also know little about how—and if—these patterns vary across groups in society, regions, countries, or over time. In this contribution, we present a framework for analysing the ways in which specific health conditions may shape the connection between citizens’ wellbeing and their interactions with politics and how research should endeavour to trace the consequences of these links for people’s lives as citizens and their full participation in the democratic political process.