Periodic Reporting for period 3 - POLAR (Polarization and its discontents: does rising economic inequality undermine the foundations of liberal societies?)
Berichtszeitraum: 2023-04-01 bis 2024-09-30
The POLAR project seeks 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 seeks to assemble a new and significantly more encompassing survey database than what earlier research has been able to rely on, and to newly evaluate the impact of rising inequality for intergenerational mobility, social cohesion and support for democracy in affluent Western societies from this data source. With these efforts, the POLAR project aims to provide new and uniquely detailed evidence on the potentially corrosive role that rising economic inequality may exert on some of the main pillars of liberal societies. The project will disseminate the results of its research through academic presentations and publications, and thereby hopes to inform the academic as well as the larger public debate on the nature of ongoing changes in Western societies, and on the necessities and prospects of containing adverse impacts of rising inequality.
Against this background, the POLAR project seeks to assemble a new and significantly more encompassing survey database than what earlier research has been able to rely on, and to newly evaluate the impact of rising inequality for intergenerational mobility, social cohesion and support for democracy in affluent Western societies from this data source. With these efforts, the POLAR project aims to provide new and uniquely detailed evidence on the potentially corrosive role that rising economic inequality may exert on some of the main pillars of liberal societies. The project will disseminate the results of its research through academic presentations and publications, and thereby hopes to inform the academic as well as the larger public debate on the nature of ongoing changes in Western societies, and on the necessities and prospects of containing adverse impacts of rising inequality.
The POLAR project aims to examine the role of rising economic inequality for social mobility, social cohesion, and support for democracy in affluent Western societies. Relative to earlier evidence from mostly cross-sectional studies, the project seeks to identify the rela-tionships between inequality and some of the key characteristics of liberal societies from changes in inequality over time. 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 is being further expanded and updated in response to the project’s substantive research agenda.
As of now, the POLAR project has 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’ authoritarian leanings, for intergenerational social reproduction and equality of opportunity, for citizens’ perceptions of fairness, meritocracy, and group conflict in society, as well as for citizens’ preferences over public redistribution. Besides 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 various source questions. This whole body of project research has been used in about 50 research presentations, and has yielded first article publications in highly-respected international journals. Further manuscripts are currently under peer review or are being prepared for submission to widely-respected international outlets. The project is hosting its website polar-project.org to post working paper publications and to inform the interested public about its research.
As of now, the POLAR project has 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’ authoritarian leanings, for intergenerational social reproduction and equality of opportunity, for citizens’ perceptions of fairness, meritocracy, and group conflict in society, as well as for citizens’ preferences over public redistribution. Besides 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 various source questions. This whole body of project research has been used in about 50 research presentations, and has yielded first article publications in highly-respected international journals. Further manuscripts are currently under peer review or are being prepared for submission to widely-respected international outlets. The project is hosting its website polar-project.org to post working paper publications and to inform the interested public about its research.
The POLAR project is assembling a new and significantly more comprehensive survey database than what prior research has been able to rely on. With this database built from existing international and national survey data sources, the project will newly evaluate the impact of rising inequality for social mobility, social cohesion and support for democracy in affluent Western societies.
All POLAR efforts are systematically relying on historical designs and over-time comparisons to trace the effect of rising inequality for some of the fundamentals of liberal societies, which is a methodologically superior approach to estimate the causal effects of inequality relative to the cross-sectional designs employed in most existing research. POLAR furthermore aims to compile a historically and geographically encompassing database, so that it will be possible to empirically assess the implications of rising inequality since the early 1980s, but also to examine systematic differences in the effects of inequality across countries that differ in terms of institutional arrangements, e.g. in the generosity and structure of national welfare states, or in terms of socio-historical trajectories, as when comparing changes observed in Western Europe and North America to those observed in the post-socialist transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Due to its multilevel architecture that combines microdata from representative surveys with contextual variation over time and place, the project is moreover able to expand its reach from a macro perspective on country characteristics to a micro perspective that integrates the level of individual citizens, and that thereby identifies for whom and in which population groups rising economic inequality is undermining the fundamentals of liberal societies.
With its unique survey database, the POLAR project is 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 is to ascertain the causal status of economic inequality in affecting some of the fundamental characteristics of liberal affluent 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.
All POLAR efforts are systematically relying on historical designs and over-time comparisons to trace the effect of rising inequality for some of the fundamentals of liberal societies, which is a methodologically superior approach to estimate the causal effects of inequality relative to the cross-sectional designs employed in most existing research. POLAR furthermore aims to compile a historically and geographically encompassing database, so that it will be possible to empirically assess the implications of rising inequality since the early 1980s, but also to examine systematic differences in the effects of inequality across countries that differ in terms of institutional arrangements, e.g. in the generosity and structure of national welfare states, or in terms of socio-historical trajectories, as when comparing changes observed in Western Europe and North America to those observed in the post-socialist transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Due to its multilevel architecture that combines microdata from representative surveys with contextual variation over time and place, the project is moreover able to expand its reach from a macro perspective on country characteristics to a micro perspective that integrates the level of individual citizens, and that thereby identifies for whom and in which population groups rising economic inequality is undermining the fundamentals of liberal societies.
With its unique survey database, the POLAR project is 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 is to ascertain the causal status of economic inequality in affecting some of the fundamental characteristics of liberal affluent 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.