Politics and Inequality in Comparative Perspective: A Research Agenda

Abstract

Democracy’s normative foundation is political equality. Yet the dominance of the elite over the masses, and the systematic exclusion of particular social and economic groups from the influence on, and outcomes of, important decisions, manifests in political inequality. If this situation is normatively intolerable, why does political inequality endure? We build on the theoretical and empirical literature of politics and inequality and the collection of articles in this special issue to argue that the reproduction of political inequality within and across nations and time results from two key interrelated mechanisms: elite coordination and mass discoordination. We discuss how these mechanisms shape patterns of contestation and participation that reproduce inequalities in both old and new democracies.

Introduction

Stakeholders of democracy are anxious about democracy’s current health and future prospects. Some academics, politicians, and civil society activists see the rise in economic inequality, dissatisfaction with democracy’s outputs and threats to civil liberties, along with the growing popularity of far-right populism, as red flags on what might be the road to democratic recession (e.g., Diamond, 2015; Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018). This anxiety encourages social scientists to question their knowledge of the heretofore unshakable foundations of democracy.

One foundation is the ideal of political equality, in which opportunities and outcomes of political decisions are in law and practice equal across the general public. The citizenry and their advocates in civil society push for a normative definition of democracy as a contested political landscape where policy decisions should closely resemble citizen preferences. The puzzle of political inequality arises precisely because, in reality, democracies are de jure but not de facto regimes of equality.

Another way of conceptualizing democracy is through a procedural definition (see Coppedge et al., 2011; Dahl, 1973). From a strict procedural perspective, there is a core difference between a democratic and a nondemocratic regime: In a democratic regime, the general public can vote and stand for office in free elections on equal formal grounds, and those who are elected get to rule. Decisions on who rules in a democracy are based in norms and laws of formal political equality. Yet rule in democracies is also based on preexisting conditions of social inequalities with regard to power and influence and the ruler is not formally required to pursue equality or follow the will of the majority.

We refer to rulers as “elites,” that is, a minority of individuals who, due to the concentration of material and symbolic resources of power, and due to their privileged structural and political position, have the capacity to make important community and societal decisions or to influence those decisions (Higley & Burton, 2006; Mills, 1956; Reis & Moore, 2005). We also refer to the “masses,” that is, people who individually have lower resources for political influence, but that collectively have the potential to reconstruct the institutions that keep the elite in power.

One important feature of political inequality within democracy is that it can never be directly institutionalized in the traditional form of caste or segregation, because even in the most minimal procedural definition of democracy, such restrictions to political voice are the very definition of nondemocratic governance. In democracies, de facto political inequality thus takes place within de jure political equality.

Structured inequalities within instances of decision making, along with myriad informal decision-making procedures that elites conduct behind the scenes, contribute heavily to why democracy’s political outcomes—across nations, time, and decision-making bodies—are unequal (Gilens, 2012; Lefkofridi & Giger, 2020; Maks-Solomon & Rigby, 2019; Wright & Rigby, 2020). This situation is sharper in some contexts and less so in others (Hooghe et al., 2019). Thus, we see political inequality as, conceptually, on a continuum. As Dahl (2006) and other political theorists have argued, where there is democracy, there is also inequality of voice. These inequalities can be severe. It is not enough to say that democracy entails political inequality. Social scientists should also postulate and estimate how much inequality there is and posit the mechanisms that increase the distance between the normative idealized version of democracy and the actual ways in which regimes operate.

Political inequality can be defined as structured differences in influence over political decisions and in outcomes (Dubrow, 2015). Democracy is defined by principles of political equality within the core idea of political citizenship (Marshall, 1950). But the causal relationship between democracy and equality was reversed in social science, as dominant models of democracy predict that democratic regimes force economic redistribution and thus cause equality. In classical models, over time, the right to vote incentivizes reelection oriented policy makers to channel social goods toward voters in the median of the income distribution, thus moving society closer to equality (Downs, 1957; Meltzer & Richard, 1981; Norris, 2012). This prediction became known as the “median voter theorem.” The “median voter” conceptual and theoretical understanding of the relationship between democracy and equality generated an optimistic view regarding the potential social benefits of democratization.

However, for both established and new competitive regimes, the triumph of democracy into the 1980s and 1990s translated into more, not less, inequality. As a result, researchers questioned the validity of the “median voter” understanding of democracy (see Kenworthy & McCall, 2007; Ross, 2006). From empirical research—rather than from abstract theorizing or mathematical formalizations—they find that democracies do not redistribute more than autocracies. Nonetheless, formal theories of democracy continue to rely on the assumption that democracies entail redistribution (e.g., Acemoglu & Robinson, 2006; Boix, 2003).

The Global Rise of Inequality

The rise of inequality within nations has united the Global North with the Global South. From the 1980s until the early 2000s, research on the newcomers of democracy from post-Communist Europe, Latin America, Asia, and Africa framed economic and political inequality in the form of abject poverty, misrepresentation, and violation of civil rights. Those were largely seen as problems of the developing world (e.g., O’Donnell, 1993). In the new democracies of Latin America, for instance, many saw the influence of previous patterns of authoritarianism and populism that were—at the time—considered to be alien to Western democracies.

Eventually, social scientists and others noticed that the level of income concentration in the Global North gradually became similar to that observed in the Global South. This recognition of reality has been slow to manifest in social science research. For instance, the increase in inequality in the United States in the early 2000s was viewed as yet another example of American exceptionalism. At the time, the American Political Science Association created a task force to address the effects of increasing inequality in American Democracy. The authors portrayed the United States as an anomaly in the West (American Political Science Association, 2004). Increasing concern with inequality in the United States gave way to other Western nations joining the “anomaly,” and now rare are the cases where inequality is not at an historic high. Income concentration is increasing in role model social democracies such as Sweden, in elder democracies such as the United Kingdom, and in former socialist republics such as Poland.

The deleterious consequences of political inequality on democracy redound: the elite play an outsized role in shaping social policies (Khan, 2012); the legislatures are male-dominated (Paxton et al., 2020) and resemble the top of the socioeconomic ladder (Hacker & Pierson, 2010); the legislators promote policies that benefit the privileged (Gilens & Page, 2014); and education and occupation continue to strongly influence political participation (Marien et al., 2010). Research shows that economic inequality depresses political engagement for everyone but the wealthy (Cole, 2018; Dubrow, 2008; Kern et al., 2015; Solt, 2008, 2015). The dominance of the elite over the masses makes equitable economic redistribution less likely (Higley, this issue; Kelly, 2020). Those and other perils of democracy transformed the expectation of a global conversion toward Western liberalism (Fukuyama, 1989) into anxieties that even Western liberal democracies could be on the road toward new forms of oligarchy (Winters, 2011).

As governments fail to solve the problem of economic inequality, and as democracy’s competitors promote political inequality and thrive, social scientists conduct cross-national comparative studies of politics and inequality (e.g., Page & Gilens, 2017; Piketty & Saez, 2006). Everything is questioned: Why do established Western democracies seem to have deviated from their trajectory of hopeful equality toward a stubbornly persistent inequality? Why has democracy in developing societies not triggered the processes of redistribution and power sharing that characterized previous waves of democratization (Mainwaring & Bizzarro, 2019; Roberts, 2016)? That all of us live in the consequences of these problems has encouraged social scientists to build on the classics of democratic theory and political action to revise how they conceptualize and measure the underlying mechanisms that produce and reproduce inequality under democracy.

Mechanisms of Political Inequality

This special issue addresses how and why political inequality remains a weak point in the foundation of democracy. The authors cover key mechanisms and processes that account for political inequality in developing and established democracies. Building on their contributions, we focus on two crucial mechanisms of political inequality. One mechanism is how elites reproduce inequalities, or “elite coordination.” A second mechanism is how social inequalities structure participation and contestation. We call this second mechanism, “mass discoordination.”

The two key mechanisms of elite coordination and mass discoordination feed off of each other. The uneven distribution of power resources encourages the elite—who head the democratic institutions and set the rules—to pursue greater concentration; meanwhile, the elite-led institutions that allow such disparities to occur promote roadblocks that either prevent groups from participating, such as in the case of disenfranchised citizens, or discourages collective coordination around shared interests. The masses remain aggrieved yet disorganized.

Elite Coordination

The elite, due to their position in powerful groups and organizations, are capable of systematic influence over political life (Higley & Burton, 2006). The very existence of a political elite is an expression of political inequality (see also Sorokin, 1959). Elite theorists argue that elite rule perpetuates because elite turnover simply generates a new set of elites (see Hoffmann-Lange, 2007, 2018; López, 2013a). To understand why political inequality endures, we must go beyond the point that the elite are the living embodiment of political inequality. Instead, we must analyze elite action and attitudes as a reproductive mechanism and as fuel for change.

The first analytical step is to acknowledge that these same social actors can promote equality as well as inequality. The elites may find that promoting democracy suits their interest because democracies zealously protect property rights (Albertus & Gay, 2017; Ansell & Samuels, 2014; North & Weingast, 1989). Elites can also promote democratic regimes in order to signal redistribution to the poor and prevent revolutionary movements (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2006; Boix, 2003). Beyond enfranchisement, elites can promote welfare policies and partial social equality as a means to mitigate the impact of modernization’s nefarious externalities, such as criminal violence (López, 2013b; Reis & Moore, 2005) and viral epidemics (de Swaan, 1988), an externality that now, in the time of the COVID-19 Pandemic since March 2020, is aggressively reinforcing structural inequalities.

A popular sentiment is that elites are to blame for the current trends in income and resource concentration that triggered movements such as Occupy and the current surge in populism. The elite have used their influence to promote greater income concentration (Bartels, 2008; Gilens, 2012; Hacker & Pierson, 2010; Kelly, 2020) and the association with aspiring autocrats places large sections of the elite in antidemocratic coalitions, regardless of their alleged democratic credentials (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018).

The incentive of “containing the poor” that drove elites to sponsor both democracy and redistribution in the 20th century appear to be less relevant today. During the Cold War, social revolution was perceived by elites as an eminent possibility, even though, for minority revolutionary groups, this task would be prohibitively hard (Weyland, 2019). Today, elites in socially explosive countries currently disregard the capacity of the poor to revolt despite apparent incentives to do so (Hossain, 2005; Moraes Silva & López, 2015; López et al. 2020; Reis & Moore, 2005). When the elite do not fear the consequences of inequality, they might as well sponsor, or simply not do anything seriously about, great economic concentration. Simply put, political inequality endures, in part, due to elite actions that maintain what they consider as an acceptable level of inequality (see also Arndt & Lukas, 2020).

While elites reproduce the inequalities that erode the quality of democracies, we need to better understand the incentives and distribution of power within that stratum. Recent studies have pointed to the gap in political influence regarding wealthier and poorer voters in the United States (Bartels, 2008; Gilens, 2012) and perhaps in other countries (e.g., Lupu & Warner, 2019). The ability to bias policies is itself a major incentive for elites to coordinate and maximize the inequalities that allow them to thrive. If democracy’s responsiveness to the wealthy may explain why elites embrace democratic regimes in unequal settings (Albertus & Gay, 2017; Ziblatt, 2017), internal fractures among elites, cleverly exploited by nationalist populists, may also explain the cases in which democracy does not survive (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018)

The first set of papers in this special issue addresses this question from different angles. John Higley has long conceptualized the elite as a multidimensional group that have built interlocking fortresses within the realms of social, economic, and political life to exert an outsized role on the shape of policy and politics (e.g., Higley & Burton, 2006; Higley & Gunther, 1992). Higley (this issue) builds on his classic elite theory framework and on the experience of different Western nations to explain how low levels of trust within the elite shapes the kind of elite dissent that characterizes populist politics. Elite coordination changed in advanced democracies. In the past, elite settlements and processes of elite convergence generated stable competitive regimes where elites enjoyed high levels of mutual security. Non-elites also benefited from more inclusive regimes. The new scenario of increasing inequality is the background for new political strategies among elite groups who coordinate among themselves to benefit from public dissatisfaction and promote populist and radical alternatives that, paradoxically, further exacerbate inequalities. Meanwhile, the masses who clamor for redistribution remain disorganized.

In the study by Jorge Atria and colleagues, the Chilean economic elite justify the deep and persistent economic and political inequalities that keep them in power through an imagined meritocracy. According to the elite, merit is based on talent, and upward mobility in the private sector is a function of merit. The Chilean elite argue that private philanthropy should replace the public sector that the elite decry as inefficient and nonmeritocratic. Higley concurs that the elite shy away from redistribution of economic and political resources. Both authors also suggest that structural configurations of political inequality, recent changes in elite composition, and cultural processes of justification can all help or hurt elite coordination. An elite that is cohesive in composition and values find it easier to coordinate around strategies that reproduce and justify inequalities. Meanwhile, divisions within the elite generate within-group conflict that, in turn, opens the way for a new elite composed of aspiring autocrats and populists. Taken together, these studies imply that shifts in elite coordination can affect inequality, perhaps with great speed.

Implicit in these articles is the idea that elite coordinated actions can repress mass behavior. In unequal democracies, the masses assess the gravity of the situation but often decide to support the inequalities of the status quo. However, the masses are not a monolithic group; within the masses, ordinary citizens and social movement actors learn to adapt and change their protest tactics. The next two articles, set in Latin America and in post-Soviet Ukraine, illustrate these possibilities and limits of elite coordination and mass discoordination.

Matias López notes that the unequal democracies of Latin America are for the most part kept in place by both the elite and the masses. Elites benefit from an unequal democracy because they thrive under the protection of repressive states. Meanwhile, the masses monitor the power of repression, calculate their odds of radical redistribution through protest, and cope with the status quo. At the heart of this relationship are citizen rights. The ability to cash in on citizen rights is, in large part, a province of the elite.

Through mass demonstrations, some of the relatively uncoordinated masses do, on occasion, challenge the elite. To challenge the elite is to risk repression. Encounter after encounter, in a long stream of these public contentious episodes, elites and masses learn from each other. Most of what we know about this “mobilization-repression nexus” comes from studies of the West. Olga Zelinska’s article on major protests in Ukraine over the past two decades points out what we know, and what we do not know, about this learning process in the post-Soviet context. Whereas the West fears a normalization of increasingly violent clashes between protestors and the state, the post-Soviet countries have long experienced this normalization. Zelinska finds that Ukraine protesters learn from transnational activists on how to coordinate with other protestors and to contend with the resurgence of Soviet-style authoritarian tactics. In each successive interaction, the state employed revamped and increasingly authoritarian tactics. While protestor tactics have been largely peaceful, the neoauthoritarian state had also been largely restrained. This restraint ended during the Euromaidan protests in Kyiv. While the masses coordinate, the state learns from that coordination and prepare for the next protest and crackdown.

Mass Discoordination

For everyday citizens, structured gender, economic, and age inequalities prevent representative politics and political action from producing equality. Voters use democracy to voice their interests in redistribution, but the tools that are preferred or available for politicians to answer to such demands often result in the reproduction of inequality (Holland, 2017; Luna, 2014). Representation and participation should empower those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, but they often do not (Gilens, 2012). Indeed, the workers at the lower rungs of the occupational ladder are essential to economic development, but their contributions are overlooked (Edwards, 2018).

Although fairer and thus more equitable redistribution would benefit the majority of the masses, in North America, Europe, and Latin America, researchers consistently find that an individual’s position in the social structure interacts with the economic and political environment to repress the mass actions that could, potentially, push the elites toward fair economic redistribution. People who possess greater resources and live in more economically equitable and more open political environments are more likely to sign petitions, attend demonstrations, and contact politicians, among other forms of noninstitutionalized political participation (Dalton et al., 2010; Gallego, 2007; Solt, 2015; Stolle & Hooghe, 2011).

But there is more to the processes of participation and contestation. Nicolás Somma and colleagues (this issue) argue that, to better understand why political inequality in participation endures, we should know the issues that drive different social groups to protest. Whereas people from across the social structure tend to participate when their lives and livelihoods are directly and immediately threatened, individuals from higher up the socioeconomic ladder are more likely to protest on “furtherance issues,” that is, social problems that do not threaten immediate survival, but would need policy intervention, such as educational reform and calling for greater political transparency. The authors examine survey data from Latin America and find this strong socioeconomic bias.

We know that micro and macro conditions of the social structure stratifies voter turnout, but we do not have many studies of how meso-characteristics, such as party actions, also play a role in stratified turnout. Matthew Polacko (this issue) examines Canada from the 1980s to the 2010s and finds that, as it happens in other nations, high-economic inequality depresses voter turnout. Interestingly, Polacko also finds that when political parties offer economic redistribution policies, the depressive impact of inequality is reduced. Theoretically, then, redistributive policies can entice people from across the social structure, and not just those at the top, to show up at the voting booth. Political parties can mobilize a broad spectrum of voters and thus turn mass discoordination into purposeful mass action.

Even if masses across the social structure may participate at more equitable levels, society would likely remain economically and politically unequal in outcomes. Markus Holdo (this issue) builds on the experiences of participatory budgeting in Brazil and Argentina to debate the circumstances in which participation actually represents inclusion and those in which it serves as a smokescreen to justify existing and durable inequalities. Participatory budgeting is an arena of power, Holdo writes. As in all places where power relationships are in view, participants are engaged in a contest. Viewing this contest in its dynamic or static dimensions opens up new ways of understanding the equity potential of participatory budgeting arenas.

Joonghyun Kwak and colleagues circle the issue back to its impetus: Whether our anxieties of democratic backsliding, caused in part by the weakening of core political institutions that are the foundations on which democracy rests, is warranted. Building on Foa and Mounk (2016) and their many critics, the authors analyze institutional and harmonized survey data from across nations and time to test the democratic backsliding thesis. Their findings suggest that trust in institutions by the youth, in comparison with the old, affects democracy. They cautiously suggest that our anxieties of democratic backsliding have merit, i.e. across nations and time, low trust in democratic institutions reduces the level of democracy. They conclude more strongly that continuing investigations into backsliding is worthwhile.

These articles highlight different mechanisms through which the elite and the masses think, act, and relate to one another, and how social structures are important forces that impact, to paraphrase Lenski (1966), “who gets what and why” in the political system. The tools of democracy can become tools of inequality, but that is not necessarily the fate of democracy. Just like elites feel the need to coordinate in order to shield themselves from too-radical redistributive demands, the masses in society also need to be able and willing to coordinate collective use of participatory tools in order to foster policies that suit the interests of society.

Conclusion

In the darkness of our anxieties, our need to make sense of political inequality takes on a bright new urgency. This urgency manifests in the rising interest among scholars for more multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary studies of what drives political inequality.

In our reading of the recent politics and inequality literature, it appears that the level of dialogue between Northern and Southern researchers remains unfortunately low. As researchers in the Global North discover political inequality anew, this special issue meets the growing demand for comparative and interdisciplinary research. Research focused exclusively on Western nations often overlooks the experience of developing countries that have, for decades, dealt with populism, inequality, and dysfunctional democracies. This guest edited issue is designed to inspire a broader dialogue in the field of politics and inequality, and specifically about how elite interests and structured representation and participation allow political inequality to endure.

In this introduction, we provided a brief state of the art on the politics of inequality in comparative perspective that highlights important research puzzles that remain unsolved. We emphasized why research on participation, representation, and contestation from both powerful and powerless individuals should be the priorities in the field of politics and inequality. Specifically, (a) how the elite reproduce and enable political inequality and (b) why representative democracy and political action have not adequately remedied political inequality. Instead of treating the elite and the obstacles to mass participation as separate issues, we propose to understand them as complementary mechanisms, i.e. elite coordination and mass discoordination, that combine to explain why political inequality endures. To generate new insights into the relationship between politics and inequality, we ask scholars across the social and behavioral sciences to leap over geographical and disciplinary boundaries.