How Liberal Political Elites in Liberal Democracies Are: A Normative Assessment of the Electoral Rhetoric of Inequality in the USA and Brazil

How do political elites justify social inequalities? And to what extent are their claims defensible from a liberal perspective? To address these questions, I implemented a novel procedure to transparently assess political rhetoric from a normative perspective. This procedure comprised two phases. In the first phase, I developed a gradual categorisation of normative claims of inequality focused on liberalism. This categorisation holds that liberalism has a baseline conception or a thin layer of consensus in the form of minimal requirements. Any theory that does not meet these requirements is outside the liberal landscape. Upon this foundation, liberals can add incremental demands on what liberalism should stand for. Such increments to the liberal minimum requirements give rise to a wide array of liberal theories. Particularly since John Stuart Mill, a number of these increments have ended up forming an inner threshold, which establishes more demanding and stronger standards. Liberal theories and positions that surpass this inner threshold are in a thicker zone of liberalism, whereas theories and positions that meet the minimum requirements but not the inner threshold are in a thinner zone of liberalism. Considering this framework, I collected claims from liberal theories of distributive justice which address the question of what constitutes a just distribution of socially valued attributes. I then classified these claims into thinner or thicker liberal claims and built a deductive codebook from that scheme. In the second phase of the research, I qualitatively examined key speeches, televised debates, and party manifestoes from the past seven presidential elections in two liberal democracies with high levels of social inequality: the USA and Brazil. I employed the codebook previously built to hand code this database and identify liberal claims of just distribution. I also used inductive coding to track non-liberal claims. Additionally, I monitored if candidates deployed claims of just distribution to criticise or justify social inequalities. Then, I assessed if and to what degree the analysed electoral discourses met thicker and thinner liberal standards. Generally, candidates adopted a critical attitude towards inequalities and mostly articulated thicker liberal claims to support their positions. This indicates that political elites seem not only to adhere to minimum liberal requirements, but they also try to sustain thicker liberal commitments. However, zooming in on the data reveals some relevant nuances. Firstly, differences in political culture seem to have had a decisive impact on how American and Brazilian candidates framed their rhetoric of inequality. Secondly, when candidates addressed inequalities directly, they tended to adopt more critical or mixed attitudes; justificatory attitudes were more common when inequality was not the main topic of discussion. Thirdly, candidates were more prone to employ thicker liberal claims when diagnosing or critiquing social inequalities; but when proposing public policies to address the issue, they were more inclined to use thinner claims, usually focused on markets and opportunities. Finally, there has been a trend of thinning out the liberal character of inequality claims over time, which has culminated in the widespread use of illiberal claims by illiberal candidates.