Political Inequality at the local level

The growing gap between rich and poor in recent decades has invigorated academic attention to political inequality – the uneven political influence among different groups. Seminal studies have documented significantly more policy responsiveness to the preferences of the rich in the US and several European countries. Thus far, this literature mostly studies preference congruence in national-level formal politics. However, our understanding of the phenomenon of output political inequality is limited by a focus on national-level formal politics. This limitation is particularly relevant when considering political inequality in the Global South but also matters elsewhere. For the Global South, the literature on distributive politics shows that political outputs produced via national level policies are just a subset of what citizens get out of politics. In this paper we present a preliminary study about political inequality at the local level in two highly economically unequal countries: Brazil and South Africa. We evaluate two measures of local political inequality. The first indicator captures whether municipal spending reflects a bias towards the priority issues (e.g. housing, transport, sanitation) of specific income groups. The second indicator captures whether specific areas of the city, which also vary in average income, are prioritised in resource allocation. The dataset combines various sources. To measure preferences we use public opinion survey data. To measure resource allocation we use different types of spending data across municipalities in Brazil and South Africa. We also use census data to account for socioeconomic differences across areas within municipalities. The pilot suggests that none of these measures shows progressivity of spending by prioritising poorer groups or neighbourhoods and that spending follows an electoral logic.