Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - UneqDems (Unequal Democracies)

Teaser

15.04.2019Rising inequality represents a pervasive trend across liberal democracies over the last two decades. Particularly striking is the fact that rich households’ shares of income and wealth have risen sharply in most of these countries. Started in September, 2017, the...

Summary

15.04.2019

Rising inequality represents a pervasive trend across liberal democracies over the last two decades. Particularly striking is the fact that rich households’ shares of income and wealth have risen sharply in most of these countries. Started in September, 2017, the Unequal Democracies Project explores how rising income and wealth inequality affects democratic politics. Our core premise is that two distinct streams of recent research must be brought together in order to address this overarching question. One of these research streams focuses on how inequality affects the policy preferences of different citizens; the other research stream addresses the effects of inequality on the responsiveness of parties and governments to the policy preferences of different citizens.

An extensive body of scholarship documents a pronounced income bias in government responsiveness in the United States. It is hardly a coincidence that income (before and after taxes and transfers) is distributed more unequally in the US than in any other advanced capitalist society. Our working hypothesis is that this pattern is not an exclusively US phenomenon: the income bias in government responsiveness becomes more pronounced in other democracies as they, too, become more unequal. A number of recent studies already point in this direction, but cross-national measures of income bias in government responsiveness have yet to be developed. Our research program seeks to tackle this challenge by relating the policy preferences of citizens to the policy preferences of government officials and actual policy decisions. Equally important, we wish to assess to what extent the income bias in government responsiveness has changed over time in a select number of countries.

Comparing levels of income bias in policy responsiveness across countries and over time should allow us to understand better the causal mechanisms behind this phenomenon. Income bias might be attributed to inequality in electoral turnout and other forms of 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 (“descriptive misrepresentation”) 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 not be biased against all low-income citizens but against specific categories of citizens (low-skill workers, women, minorities, immigrants) who are over-represented in the lower half of the income distribution.

The US literature tells us that the preferences of more affluent citizens tend to prevail when they are opposed to the preferences of average and low-income citizens. To the extent that income bias increases with income inequality, this could simply be a result of more polarized preferences (rather than an increase in income bias per se). Thus it becomes necessary to take into account how rising inequality affects the policy preferences of different citizens. Relative to existing literature on this topic, the Unequal Democracies Project focuses on concrete policies, as distinct from broad political orientations captured by survey questions about “support for redistribution.” 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 lik

Work performed

15.04.2019

A team consisting of nine researchers—two professors, five postdocs and three PhD students—has been assembled since the start of the ERC project in September 2017. Three additional PhD students, working on independent projects that speak to our overall concerns, participate regularly in the activities of the research team. (See website for further details on the background, institutional affiliation and funding of team members).

Based on extensive discussions of individual interests and competences as well as the overall objectives of the ERC project, specific research activities have been organized into two main working groups and two smaller groups. Consisting of four team members (Pontusson, Giger, Rosset and Lascombes), one working group has designed a survey to be fielded by Ipsos (a market research company) in fourteen countries in June 2019. Co-funded by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation, with Professor Nathalie Giger as PI, the survey will explore perceptions of unequal political representation as well as perceptions of income inequality, norms about fairness, and preferences for different kinds of redistributive policies. Contractual arrangements with Ipsos have been vetted and approved by the University of Geneva’s Data Protection Officer. Currently being pre-tested, the questionnaire has been approved by our Ethics Commission. While developing the survey, members of this working group have continued their ongoing research in the field of comparative public opinion and political behavior.

Apart from the PI, the members of the second working group (Käppner, Joosten and Poltier) were recruited in the Fall of 2018. This group focuses on the question of unequal political representation. To explore this question comparatively, the group has assembled a new dataset based on existing cross-national surveys that will allows us to measure policy preferences by income across more than 50 countries and also, for some countries, to explore variation in government responsiveness since the early 1970s. A first, exploratory paper is currently being drafted. The two PhD students attached to this working group have begun to design PhD projects that will combine cross-national quantitative analyses with more qualitative analyses of policy-making in select countries. A postdoc who is more loosely associated with the second working group (Rennwald) has started a research project that uses data from the International Social Survey Program to explore how perceptions of one’s own political influence (“external efficacy”) varies by income and occupation and how such perceptions have changed over time.

The two smaller working groups—or projects—straddle the distinction between the preferences and behavior of citizens, on the one hand, and government responsiveness to citizens, on the other hand. Carried out by the PI and one postdoc (Wüest), the first of these “transversal” projects addresses the origins as well as the consequences of the fact members of parliament typically come from more prestigious occupational backgrounds than the citizens they are supposed to represent (“descriptive misrepresentation”). A prior grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation funded a survey experiment about voter preferences for different parliamentary candidates that was fielded in 2017 and a paper reporting the results of this experiment is currently under review. We have designed and obtained ethics approval for a second survey experiment that will be fielded in the UK and the US in May-June 2019.

Focusing on trade unions, the second transversal project addresses the effects of union membership on the policy preferences and political behavior of individual citizens as well as the role of unions as collective actors who affect government responsiveness to different categories of citizens. Drawing on existing national and cross-national data, the researchers engaged

Final results

15.04.2019

Though we anticipate some turnover in postdoc researchers over the next 18 months, the core research activities of the Unequal Democracies Project, as described above, will continue for the duration of the ERC grant. Postdoc researchers who might take up academic positions elsewhere will remain affiliated with the project so long as they continue to do research on topics related to the relationship between economic and political inequality.

Two substantive themes will be added to the overall research program in the course of its second phase (i.e., the next 18 months). First, our discussions and empirical analyses to date have followed existing literature in political science by focusing policy of different income groups and unequal political representation conceived in terms of “income bias.” In the next phase, we want to pay more attention to the representation of the policy preferences of socio-economic groups defined by occupation and sector of employment. This theme is part of two of the research projects that we have already started. The second theme to be developed over the next 18 month concerns the political consequences of unequal representation—most obviously, whether objective measures of unequal representation and perception of unequal representation are associated, at the individual level and at the macro level, with political disengagement and/or support for populist/extremist parties. A new postdoc will almost certainly be hired to work on this project.

We are also planning to expand our collaboration with scholars outside Switzerland over the next 18 months. The conference that will take place at the University of Geneva in June, 2019, represents a first step in this direction. Most immediately, this conference will be followed by a workshop at the University of Amsterdam in November, 2019, organized by Professor Brian Burgoon (and financed locally). Burgoon and Pontusson have identified 6-7 scholars who have accepted invitations to the Geneva conference and will be invited to the Amsterdam workshop. Our plan is to propose a special issue on “mechanisms of unequal representation” based the papers presented at the second workshop. In addition, Pontusson has begun to plan for an edited volume in collaboration with Professor Noam Lupu (Vanderbilt University), who will be visiting the University of Geneva for the first half of 2020. With a larger set of contributors and a broader thematic orientation, the edited volume will also build on the June 2019 conference in Geneva, with a follow-up conference at the Vanderbilt University planned for September 2020 (again financed locally). The “Anxieties of Democracy” program of the American Social Science Research Council have expressed keen interest in this project, as have the editors of a new book series with Cambridge University Press (in association with the SSRC program). An important objective of these collaborative initiatives is to enhance the international exposure and networks of younger members of the ERC research team in Geneva.

Website & more info

More info: https://unequaldemocracies.unige.ch/en/home/.