One of the many issues which hasn't had the attention it deserves in this election campaign is the paradox of voter turnout: the people most likely to vote are those with least at stake, whilst those least likely to vote have the most at stake.

I mean this in two ways.

First, the rich are more likely to vote than the poor; the IPPR has said (pdf) that in 2010 turnout in the highest-income quintile was 22.7 percentage point higher than that for the lowest quintile - implying that the rich are 35% more likely to vote than the poor. But the poor have (proportionately) more to lose than the rich. Any intelligent person on a six-figure salary should be able to afford the slightly higher taxes they'll pay under a Labour government without much discomfort. The policies that impose genuine suffering are benefit sanctions, the bedroom tax and the petty tyrannies of the DWP of the sort documented by the great Kate Belgrave. And this is not to mention the £12bn of unspecified benefit cuts planned by the Tories; these are equivalent to £45 per working age benefit recipient per week - a cut which cannot be imposed without huge suffering.

Secondly, the old are more likely vote than the young; in 2010, 74.7% of over-65s voted compared (pdf) to just 51.8% of 18-24 year-olds.

But again, the young have more at stake than oldsters. No main party plans to make big changes to pensioner benefits. But governments can greatly shape the lives of younger people, not least because youth unemployment can have long-lasting scarring effects upon future incomes, job prospects and health.

What explains this paradox? Why will I vote even though the election will make very little material difference to me whilst millions of my fellow citizens won't even though it does matter more to them?

I suspect that part of the story lies in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We older, richer people have a higher demand for self-actualization than those who are struggling just to get by. We therefore want a government that doesn't too badly offend our sense of justice and propriety, so we take more interest in party politics than the poor who have more pressingly immediate material concerns.

This, though, isn't the whole story because, as the IPPR pointed out, turnout inequality is a relatively new phenomenon; it was small in the 1980s.What has also happened is what the IPPR calls a "vicious cycle of disaffection and under-representation" among the young and poor:

As policy becomes less responsive to their interests, more and more decide that politics has little to say to them.

What we're seeing is a form of learned helplessness in which people have resigned themselves to inequality.

Unequal turnout, though, surely matters not just because it undermines the democratic principle that citizens should have equal political power but also because it is itself a cause of material inequality; Sean McElwee points out that, in the US, "states with higher turnout inequality (more rich people voting than poor people) have higher income inequality."

So, what can be done about this? The IPPR recommends compulsory voting and Matthew Flinders advocates increasing political literacy. I'm not sure these are complete solutions. A few weeks ago Labour's Rachel Reeves said:

We are not the party of people on benefits. We don't want to be seen, and we're not, the party to represent those who are out of work.

If Labour has that attitude, doesn't benefit recipients' reluctance to vote become more understandable?

Perhaps we are reverting to the pre-democratic age, in which politics consisted of the rich debating among themselves how best to deal with the poor whilst the poor themselves were excluded from that debate.