In this paper, we examine the relationship between economic inequality, political polarization, and non-violent anti-government protest. While significant research on the relationship between economic inequality and protest have found only weak relationships at best, we argue that such analyses ignore a key intervening variable: political polarization. Inequality thus only raises the probability of protest to the degree it increase political polarization. To test this theory, we created an original measure of political polarization based on measures of variance (i.e., disagreement) in mass satisfaction with democracy using survey data from 115 countries from 1973-2012. Time series analysis suggests that while inequality is significantly related to polarization, only polarization is predictive of non-violent government protest. The paper sheds additional light on the conditional relationship between inequality and political participation.
