POLINEQUAL is a comparative research project which focuses on understanding the causes and political consequences of citizens’ perceptions of economic inequality in France, Great Britain and Sweden.
POLINEQUAL aims to investigate the causes and mechanisms that motivate citizens to respond to economic inequality. Conceptually, it is based on four central assumptions:
1. Perceptions of economic inequality are biased as they are mediated by justice evaluations and, thus, do not mirror objective levels of economic inequality.
2. Perceptions of economic inequality are informed by facts, ideological cues, media representations and personal heuristics.
3. Perceptions and evaluations are malleable to the extent that economic inequality is being politicized and becomes politically salient.
4. Politically salient perceptions and evaluations of economic inequality evoke emotional, attitudinal and behavioural responses.
In POLINEQUAL’s conceptualisation, perceptions of economic inequality – and justice evaluations that instil them – originate from social norms that are deeply rooted in the ‘moral economies’ of welfare regimes and malleable as a function of individual exposure to and receptivity of facts, ideological cues, representations and heuristics of economic inequality. In principle, the project pursues two paths: 1) It investigates the nature of interrelationships between media representations, ideological cues and individual perceptions and evaluations of economic inequality and to what extent the latter are conditioned by collectively shared distributive justice norms. 2) It investigates the impact of politically salient individual perceptions and evaluations of inequality on emotions and political behaviour. Its aim is to develop a theoretical framework which explains the causes and mechanisms of individual perceptions of economic inequality being contingent on national institutional arrangements, ideological cues, media frames and personal heuristics.
The research design is based on a mixed-methods approach, organized in five work packages and combining data derived from online focus groups, discourse and content analysis of party programmes and media representations, representative online surveys and experimental studies.
The work packages are:
WP1: Heuristics of economic inequality (online focus groups)
WP2: Identifying ideological cues of economic inequality in elites’ discourses (discourse and content analysis)
WP3: Mass media’s representations of economic inequality (discourse and content analysis)
WP4: Connecting perceptions and evaluations of economic inequality with their macro-, meso-, and micro-origins and revealing their consequences (representative online surveys)
WP5: Establishing the causality of ideological cues and framing effects (online survey experiments)
