Periodic Reporting for period 4 - WEALTHPOL (The Politics of Wealth Inequality and Mobility in the Twenty-First Century)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2021-11-01 al 2022-10-31
The core questions that the WEALTHPOL project is asking are: how and why does wealth inequality and mobility vary across countries; how do government policies affect wealth inequality and mobility; and how does variation in wealth affect citizen attitudes about their preferred government policies? This ground-breaking interdisciplinary project has been designed with three work packages to answer those questions, aiming to transform our knowledge about wealth inequality and wealth mobility across Europe and beyond. As wealth inequalities rise to levels unseen since the ‘Gilded Age’ of the early twentieth century, it is crucial for social scientists to understand not only the magnitude of this change but how it is connected to underlying political struggles and how it shapes the social and political debates of the future. By connecting data on wealth inequality and mobility to the political and policy space around wealth, and then to citizens’ attitudes to wealth, WEALTHPOL brings politics and individual behaviour into the study of wealth for the first time. It also generated a series of novel and comprehensive databases that will help scholars and policymakers alike develop responses to these pressing challenges. Thus, WEALTHPOL revolutionises our understanding of – and our capacity to respond to – the politics of capital in the twenty-first century.
WEALTHPOL 1 developed, explored and analysed cross-national and sub-national data on individual and national wealth. Three datasets were created and are publicly available. First, a ‘one stop shop’ database of every question pertaining to wealth across 30 national household panel datasets. Second, local and regional data on house prices for twenty-eight countries. Third, a cross-national time-series data at the country level of wealth inequality from 1800.
The data developed in WEALTHPOL 1 has been used in a broad series of published and working papers. The project article ‘Housing and Populism’ co-authored by PI Ben Ansell with David Adler (Oxford), was published in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal West European Politics. A second published paper developing the connection between house prices and populist support was co-authored by WEALTHPOL team members Ben Ansell and Jacob Nyrup. The paper was published in 2022 in the Journal of Politics, one of the ‘big three’ journals in political science, and received coverage in the Danish newspaper Zetland.
We also developed a research agenda on the politics of housing affordability. In a paper co-authored by WEALTHPOL members Ben Ansell and Asli Cansunar, published in the leading social policy journal Journal of European Social Policy, we show low levels of local housing affordability lead to a polarization in political attitudes between renters and owners.
Housing also affected citizens’ behaviour during the COVID pandemic. In an article published in West European Politics by team members Ben Ansell, Asli Cansunar, and Mads Elkjær, we find areas in the UK, Sweden, and Denmark with high house prices had more social distancing during the pandemic, as people with larger, more expensive houses found ‘work from home’ easier.
A final published article by WEALTHPOL team member Mads Elkjær connected wealth and income inequality to political responsiveness in Europe and was published in the prestigious Perspectives on Politics. The paper shows politicians generally respond more to wealthier voters but that this effect is highly conditional on model specification.
With Jane Gingrich (Oxford), PI Ben Ansell wrote a report for the Institute of Fiscal Studies Deaton Review of Inequality, exploring political inequality in Britain since 1964, particularly the role of homeownership and house prices.
PI Ben Ansell also published a peer-invited (not peer-reviewed) paper on housing: a literature overview article on ‘The Politics of Housing’ published by the prestigious Annual Review of Political Science.
WEALTHPOL 1 remains fruitful, with a series of working papers posted at the University of Oxford’s ORA archive at https://ora.ox.ac.uk/.
WEALTHPOL 2 looked at wealth policies and political rhetoric. Team members Laure Bokobza and Elkjær developed a novel cross-national dataset of wealth tax policies. The dataset is available on the project’s website and will be employed in a number of future projects.
In terms of political rhetoric, Ansell, Bokobza and Nyrup have a working paper available at ORA that analyses the full corpus of British parliamentary speeches and uses unsupervised machine learning techniques to parse the structure of speech over housing and wealth.
WEALTHPOL 3 was also completed in 2021 and 2022. This project involved online lab experiments that culminated in a paper co-authored by the WEALTHPOL team, available on ORA and presented at Oxford. We show that participants respond differently to economic benefits they receive as wealth versus earnings and that information about the distribution of resources across participants has different impacts on income versus wealth taxation.
WEALTHPOL 3 also involved running three surveys in the UK (one in 2021, two in 2022), each including experimental components. Work from these papers has been presented at international conferences in Czechia and Canada, as well as at Harvard, and four working papers using this data are available at ORA. They are in various stages of submission to journals. We ran a survey including information treatments and conjoint elements across seven European countries in 2022. An early working paper analysing this data is posted at ORA.
The data developed in WEALTHPOL 1 has been used in a broad series of published and working papers. The project article ‘Housing and Populism’ co-authored by PI Ben Ansell with David Adler (Oxford), was published in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal West European Politics. A second published paper developing the connection between house prices and populist support was co-authored by WEALTHPOL team members Ben Ansell and Jacob Nyrup. The paper was published in 2022 in the Journal of Politics, one of the ‘big three’ journals in political science, and received coverage in the Danish newspaper Zetland.
We also developed a research agenda on the politics of housing affordability. In a paper co-authored by WEALTHPOL members Ben Ansell and Asli Cansunar, published in the leading social policy journal Journal of European Social Policy, we show low levels of local housing affordability lead to a polarization in political attitudes between renters and owners.
Housing also affected citizens’ behaviour during the COVID pandemic. In an article published in West European Politics by team members Ben Ansell, Asli Cansunar, and Mads Elkjær, we find areas in the UK, Sweden, and Denmark with high house prices had more social distancing during the pandemic, as people with larger, more expensive houses found ‘work from home’ easier.
A final published article by WEALTHPOL team member Mads Elkjær connected wealth and income inequality to political responsiveness in Europe and was published in the prestigious Perspectives on Politics. The paper shows politicians generally respond more to wealthier voters but that this effect is highly conditional on model specification.
With Jane Gingrich (Oxford), PI Ben Ansell wrote a report for the Institute of Fiscal Studies Deaton Review of Inequality, exploring political inequality in Britain since 1964, particularly the role of homeownership and house prices.
PI Ben Ansell also published a peer-invited (not peer-reviewed) paper on housing: a literature overview article on ‘The Politics of Housing’ published by the prestigious Annual Review of Political Science.
WEALTHPOL 1 remains fruitful, with a series of working papers posted at the University of Oxford’s ORA archive at https://ora.ox.ac.uk/.
WEALTHPOL 2 looked at wealth policies and political rhetoric. Team members Laure Bokobza and Elkjær developed a novel cross-national dataset of wealth tax policies. The dataset is available on the project’s website and will be employed in a number of future projects.
In terms of political rhetoric, Ansell, Bokobza and Nyrup have a working paper available at ORA that analyses the full corpus of British parliamentary speeches and uses unsupervised machine learning techniques to parse the structure of speech over housing and wealth.
WEALTHPOL 3 was also completed in 2021 and 2022. This project involved online lab experiments that culminated in a paper co-authored by the WEALTHPOL team, available on ORA and presented at Oxford. We show that participants respond differently to economic benefits they receive as wealth versus earnings and that information about the distribution of resources across participants has different impacts on income versus wealth taxation.
WEALTHPOL 3 also involved running three surveys in the UK (one in 2021, two in 2022), each including experimental components. Work from these papers has been presented at international conferences in Czechia and Canada, as well as at Harvard, and four working papers using this data are available at ORA. They are in various stages of submission to journals. We ran a survey including information treatments and conjoint elements across seven European countries in 2022. An early working paper analysing this data is posted at ORA.
WEALTHPOL developed a new scholarly literature on (a) housing and populism, and (b) the politics of housing affordability marked a major advancement for the field of political economy, which had previously not taken seriously housing. By connecting housing to the ‘two dimensions’ of politics: material and cultural, the project has shown how changes in the value of housing in the past few decades have fundamentally shaped our contemporary politics.
In terms of WEALTHPOL 2 the team developed a new way of connecting unsupervised and supervised machine learning in order to categorise thousands of speeches on housing in Parliament. The wealth policy database has also significantly advanced our understanding of the variation since World War Two in inheritance tax rates, their progressivity, and their exclusions. This marks a major advance on existing tax databases.
In terms of WEALTHPOL 3, the lab experiments conducted advanced beyond our initial plans and included the development of a unique strategy of informing participants several days ahead of the experiment about an endowment they had received and then ‘investing’ it for them with a random return. Then participants played a slider task to accrue earnings and in groups of twenty voted over taxing the invested endowments and the slider earnings, with different information about the distribution of each provided randomly. Due to the COVID pandemic we ran these as online rather than physical lab experiments.
Finally, WEALTHPOL was able to run more surveys than initially expected and conducted different information experiments in the UK, including an experiment comparing local and national housing inequality; an experiment comparing local levels of social mobility; and one comparing the distributions of income and wealth.
In terms of WEALTHPOL 2 the team developed a new way of connecting unsupervised and supervised machine learning in order to categorise thousands of speeches on housing in Parliament. The wealth policy database has also significantly advanced our understanding of the variation since World War Two in inheritance tax rates, their progressivity, and their exclusions. This marks a major advance on existing tax databases.
In terms of WEALTHPOL 3, the lab experiments conducted advanced beyond our initial plans and included the development of a unique strategy of informing participants several days ahead of the experiment about an endowment they had received and then ‘investing’ it for them with a random return. Then participants played a slider task to accrue earnings and in groups of twenty voted over taxing the invested endowments and the slider earnings, with different information about the distribution of each provided randomly. Due to the COVID pandemic we ran these as online rather than physical lab experiments.
Finally, WEALTHPOL was able to run more surveys than initially expected and conducted different information experiments in the UK, including an experiment comparing local and national housing inequality; an experiment comparing local levels of social mobility; and one comparing the distributions of income and wealth.