As the share of income and wealth that accrue to rich households has risen sharply in most countries, rising inequality represents a pervasive trend across liberal democracies over the last 20-30 years. We might have expected democratically elected governments to deliver more compensatory redistribution, but this does not seem to have happened. In many countries, the redistributive effect of taxes and transfers has actually declined. The UNEQDEMS project seeks to shed light on this puzzle by exploring how inequality influences the public policy preferences of different citizens and, in parallel, how inequality influences government responsiveness to the policy preferences of different citizens. The core analytical strategy of the project as a whole is to pursue these twin objectives through cross-national comparison of changes over time.
Relative to literature preferences for redistribution, our approach seeks to assess support for different types of redistributive policy. Exploring how responses to rising low-end inequality (attitudes towards the poor) differ from responses to rising high-end inequality (attitudes towards the rich), our approach to preference formation also seeks to take categorical inequalities into account. Some manifestations of rising inequality may be more apparent to citizens than others and different forms of inequality may be perceived as more or less legitimate. It seems likely that resource advantages that affluent citizens and corporate interests enjoy in unequal democracies influence not only the attitudes and behavior of political decision-makers, but also the attitudes and behavior of citizens.
Relative to the literature on unequal responsiveness, the goal of UNEQDEMS is to shed light on the causal mechanisms behind this phenomenon through comparative analysis. Income bias in representation might be attributed to inequality in political participation. It may also be due to the fact that elected representatives tend to be individuals with relatively high levels of education, occupational status, and income or to the influence that wealthy individuals exert over policy through political donations and control of media. In the European context, finally, income bias may be related to the transfer of political decision-making to the supranational level. In exploring mechanisms that give rise to income bias, our research program considers representation of specific categories of citizens: unequal democracies may be biased against specific categories of citizens who are over-represented in the lower half of the income distribution (low-skill workers, women, minorities, immigrants).
Our research program pays particular attention to the decline of trade unions and related changes in the social base and strategic orientation of social democratic parties. Citizens who belong to unions are more likely to participate in politics than their fellow citizens and the effect of union membership on participation is particularly pronounced for citizens with low levels of education and low incomes. In general, union members are better informed about changes in the income distribution and more likely to respond to rising inequality by demanding compensatory redistribution. And, finally, there can be little doubt that trade unions, as collective actors, have historically served as a counter-weight to the political influence of affluent citizens and corporate interests.
Our working hypothesis is that grievances about unequal political representation of different citizens, or categories of citizens, are crucially important for understanding the discontent that fuels support for populist parties. In policy terms, compensatory redistribution of income might be seen as a means to restore the legitimacy of free trade and free movement of labor and capital, but it is not by accident that governments have failed to move in this direction. We need to engage with changes in the way that democracy works and to consider, based on empirical research, concrete reforms to reverse inegalitarian trends in the political domain over the last two decades.
