Periodic Reporting for period 4 - POLAR (Polarization and its discontents: does rising economic inequality undermine the foundations of liberal societies?)
Reporting period: 2024-10-01 to 2025-09-30
The POLAR project has sought to document, evaluate and understand whether, to which extent and why rising economic inequality may constitute a matter of public concern in European and other affluent societies. Economic disparities have grown throughout the Western world over the past decades, partly as a result of technological change and the transition to post-industrial labour markets, and partly because traditionally egalitarian institutions like trade unions and the welfare state have become weaker in many countries. In view of these profound changes, many political observers conclude that rising economic inequality has been an important cause behind increasing polarization and public dissatisfaction in liberal democracies. There also is an established and interdisciplinary academic literature that predicts socially corrosive effects of rising inequality, yet to date most studies have relied on comparisons between high- and low-inequality countries rather than on tracing the actual consequences of rising inequality over time. In contrast, the relatively small number of more recent studies that have utilized historical designs and over-time comparisons tend to find a significantly smaller role for rising economic inequality than what has been suggested in the received academic literature.
Against this background, the POLAR project has assembled a new and encompassing survey database from which to newly evaluate the impact of rising inequality for some of the main pillars of liberal societies like intergenerational mobility, social cohesion and support for democracy in affluent Western societies. The project continues to disseminate its findings through academic presentations and publications, and thereby hopes to inform the academic as well as the larger public debate on the nature of ongoing economic changes in Western societies, as well as on the necessities and prospects of containing some of the adverse societal impacts of rising inequality.
Against this background, the POLAR project has assembled a new and encompassing survey database from which to newly evaluate the impact of rising inequality for some of the main pillars of liberal societies like intergenerational mobility, social cohesion and support for democracy in affluent Western societies. The project continues to disseminate its findings through academic presentations and publications, and thereby hopes to inform the academic as well as the larger public debate on the nature of ongoing economic changes in Western societies, as well as on the necessities and prospects of containing some of the adverse societal impacts of rising inequality.
The POLAR project has aimed to examine the role of rising economic inequality for social mobility, social cohesion, and support for democracy in affluent Western societies. To that end, the project has been assembling a newly harmonized and cross-nationally comparative database from existing international and national household surveys, and has been merging the survey microdata with aggregate data on changing income distributions as well as other macroeconomic and contextual indicators. To date, the POLAR database is spanning data from well over five million individual respondents that have been surveyed in more than 100 countries between 1980 and 2020, and this database will continue to be updated and expanded in the future.
During its lifetime, POLAR researchers have been using this database to examine the role of rising inequality for citizens’ trust in fellow citizens, for their trust in the institutions of liberal democracy, for citizens’ support for authoritarian leadership, for intergenerational social reproduction and equality of opportunity, for citizens’ perceptions of fairness, meritocracy, and group conflict in society, for the stratification of marriage markets, and for citizens’ preferences over public redistribution and their voting behaviour. For almost all of these fundamentals of liberal democratic societies, we find adverse effects of rising inequality in our empirical data. This is an important finding insofar as our research has deliberately evaluated the implications of changing inequality within countries, which is much more strongly indicative of a genuinely causal role of economic inequality than when similar inferences have been reached from comparisons of more or less equal countries at the same point in time. That being said, our research also suggests important nuances to this main finding: for example, in contrast to some widely-publicized claims, equality tends not to be “better for everyone”, but often better for the less privileged members of society. Likewise, adverse effects of rising inequality are not inevitably uniform across countries, but may in some cases be empirically mitigated by effective public safety nets, especially so with respect to avoiding adverse political consequences of high inequality. Outside of the political realm, however, it often turns out to be the case that sustaining economic growth appears as the more effective political strategy to sustain the fabric of liberal societies than focusing more narrowly on combatting inequality. Beyond its substantive research, the POLAR project has also contributed methodological innovations, as e.g. regards the measurement of income inequality, the harmonization of income data across different household surveys, and the development of a new statistical model for analysing ordinal data from different source questionnaires.
To date, this whole body of POLAR research has been used in about 75 research presentations, and has already yielded several article publications in highly-respected international academic journals. The project team continues to disseminate its research findings through academic presentations, through the dissemination of methodological contributions and further international article publications as well as through a book manuscript that is under preparation by the P.I. to detail the project’s substantive findings in a more overarching manner. During and beyond its lifetime, the project is hosting its website polar-project.org to post working paper publications and to inform the interested public about its research and any new research outputs.
During its lifetime, POLAR researchers have been using this database to examine the role of rising inequality for citizens’ trust in fellow citizens, for their trust in the institutions of liberal democracy, for citizens’ support for authoritarian leadership, for intergenerational social reproduction and equality of opportunity, for citizens’ perceptions of fairness, meritocracy, and group conflict in society, for the stratification of marriage markets, and for citizens’ preferences over public redistribution and their voting behaviour. For almost all of these fundamentals of liberal democratic societies, we find adverse effects of rising inequality in our empirical data. This is an important finding insofar as our research has deliberately evaluated the implications of changing inequality within countries, which is much more strongly indicative of a genuinely causal role of economic inequality than when similar inferences have been reached from comparisons of more or less equal countries at the same point in time. That being said, our research also suggests important nuances to this main finding: for example, in contrast to some widely-publicized claims, equality tends not to be “better for everyone”, but often better for the less privileged members of society. Likewise, adverse effects of rising inequality are not inevitably uniform across countries, but may in some cases be empirically mitigated by effective public safety nets, especially so with respect to avoiding adverse political consequences of high inequality. Outside of the political realm, however, it often turns out to be the case that sustaining economic growth appears as the more effective political strategy to sustain the fabric of liberal societies than focusing more narrowly on combatting inequality. Beyond its substantive research, the POLAR project has also contributed methodological innovations, as e.g. regards the measurement of income inequality, the harmonization of income data across different household surveys, and the development of a new statistical model for analysing ordinal data from different source questionnaires.
To date, this whole body of POLAR research has been used in about 75 research presentations, and has already yielded several article publications in highly-respected international academic journals. The project team continues to disseminate its research findings through academic presentations, through the dissemination of methodological contributions and further international article publications as well as through a book manuscript that is under preparation by the P.I. to detail the project’s substantive findings in a more overarching manner. During and beyond its lifetime, the project is hosting its website polar-project.org to post working paper publications and to inform the interested public about its research and any new research outputs.
The POLAR project has been assembling a new and comprehensive survey database from existing international and national survey data sources in order to newly evaluate the impact of rising inequality for social mobility, social cohesion and support for democracy in affluent Western societies. Based on this newly compiled dataset, all POLAR research efforts have systematically been relying on historical designs and over-time comparisons to trace the effect of rising inequality for the fabric of liberal societies, which is a methodologically superior approach to estimate the causal effects of inequality relative to the cross-sectional designs that had been employed in most prior research. The POLAR project furthermore has aimed to compile a historically and geographically encompassing database, which has allowed it to empirically assess the implications of rising inequality since around the early 1980s, but also to examine systematic differences in the effects of inequality across countries that differ in terms of e.g. national welfare states or national socio-historical trajectories.
With its unique survey database, the POLAR project has been ideally positioned to revisit received scientific knowledge, to help adjudicate cases of conflicting empirical evidence in the existing literature, and to offer richly detailed as well as theoretically and practically relevant new evidence on the social, economic, and political implications of rising inequality in Western societies. The overarching theme of all POLAR research has been to ascertain the causal status of economic inequality in affecting some of the fundamentals of liberal societies, and to identify relevant social processes and mechanisms whereby rising inequality has been contributing to anti-liberal trends in the social, economic, or political domain in Western societies.
With its unique survey database, the POLAR project has been ideally positioned to revisit received scientific knowledge, to help adjudicate cases of conflicting empirical evidence in the existing literature, and to offer richly detailed as well as theoretically and practically relevant new evidence on the social, economic, and political implications of rising inequality in Western societies. The overarching theme of all POLAR research has been to ascertain the causal status of economic inequality in affecting some of the fundamentals of liberal societies, and to identify relevant social processes and mechanisms whereby rising inequality has been contributing to anti-liberal trends in the social, economic, or political domain in Western societies.