Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WEALTHPOL (The Politics of Wealth Inequality and Mobility in the Twenty-First Century)

Teaser

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...

Summary

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.

WEALTHPOL 1 will develop the first comprehensive open-access collection of data about the distribution and inheritance of wealth in Europe and beyond. WEALTHPOL 2 provides the first political database of how governments shape the pattern of wealth through political pledges and policymaking, spanning seven decades and thirty-seven countries. Finally, WEALTHPOL 3 uses cutting-edge laboratory and survey experiments to expand our knowledge about what citizens think about wealth. Do they see wealth inheritance as undermining social mobility or do they see it as a natural desire to help out one’s progeny?

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 advances far beyond the important work of Piketty, bringing politics and individual behaviour into the study of wealth for the first time. It also generates 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.

Work performed

This is our first reporting period. Work on Work Package 1 as well as preparations for Work Packages 2 and 3 are on track, even though the team has only recently reached full complement. Some work on the WEALTHPOL project was initially delayed because of the timing of hiring, but we are very happy with the expertise of the team we now have in place. Major achievements in our first eighteen months include a day workshop which we ran in April 2018, to which we invited policymakers, politicians, and other key academics from the field. The keynote was given by Ed Miliband, MP, and there were talks by speakers such as Paul Johnson (Institute of Fiscal Studies) and Torsten Bell (Resolution Foundation) as well as roundtable discussions with, among others, Polly Toynbee (columnist and journalist for the Guardian), Sir Andrew Dilnot (Warden of Nuffield College), and Frank Soodean (Rowntree Foundation). This event helped build our stakeholder base, and laid the groundwork of relationships which will be useful in the dissemination stage of the project. The team have also been collecting the necessary data to implement Work Package 1, and are confident that they will be able to produce the wealth distribution and mobility database outlined in the grant agreement. The team have also begun training for Work Package 2, honing their skills on text analysis and machine learning. Work Package 3 will not begin for a short while, but the team has developed a pre-analysis plan for the experiments, and have met with the team at the Centre for Experimental Social Sciences (CESS) here in Oxford, where the experiments will be conducted, to discuss the plan. Various members of the team are working on papers and other results which we expect to be able to disseminate soon; working papers and materials from presentations given are available on the project website.

Final results

We are currently collecting data at the national, sub-national, and individual level, and expect to analyse this over the coming period, as per the original grant agreement. This project is creating a novel database for future social science researchers and we look forward to sharing the data and project outputs as they are completed.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.wealthpol.web.ox.ac.uk.