Previous research has shown repeatedly that, overall, policies in the US are quite congruent with what people politically want. However, once this general pattern is broken up to specific groups in society—mostly based on income—it becomes clear that policies are much better in tune with the preferences of the rich than those of the poor. If this pattern is systematic rather than coincidental, it poses a real threat to democracy, specifically to the democratic principal of equality. Although equal responsiveness should never be seen as the sole objective in a democracy, it is an important aspect. We therefore propose to investigate this topic further in the European context. Our first aim will be to see whether the patterns in the US also hold in Europe, and whether responsiveness is differential. Our second aim is to better understand cross-national patterns by looking at factors that may improve political inequality—economic equality, type of representation, and other power distributing institutions may help to understand the mechanisms of differential responsiveness. We thus seek to address the question concerning the extent of policy-responsiveness, as well as concerning the explanation of such patterns. Using data from the European social survey, the OECD and Eurostat, we create dataset including European countries over the period of 2002-2010 and use time-series cross sectional methods to find whether levels of social expenditure respond equally to the preferences of richer and poorer people. Furthermore, we investigate how a number of structural factors help explain the responsiveness.
