Social Inequality and Political Instability

Russia and China are the two largest members of the BRIC(S if you include South Africa). On Goldman Sachs projections, China will be largest economy in the world by 2050, and Russia the sixth-largest (measured in GDP at purchasing power parity). But they are also, and increasingly, two of the world’s most unequal countries, measured in terms of the Gini coefficient or in other ways (according to Forbes in 2014, for instance, China had the world’s second-largest number of billionaires and Russia its third-largest). It is one of the oldest findings of political science that social inequality on this scale will almost certainly be accompanied by political instability. As Aristotle put it more than two thousand years ago in his Politics, 'when men are equal they are contented'; accordingly, ‘democracy is safer and less liable to revolution than oligarchy'. This paper uses quantitative evidence and especially an early 2014 nationally representative survey in Russia to examine two issues: first of all, what is the distribution of household income across these two societies, and their counterparts elsewhere? And secondly, what is the relationship between objective differences in living standards, a perception that differences in living standards are too great, and a propensity towards political instability?