Political (Dis)Engagement: Inequality as a Challenge to Democracy

We seek to convene a section consisting of five panels on the study of inequality at the individual-level. We are interested in inequality’s relationship to individuals, their orientation to political institutions, their resultant political behaviour and related political attitudes. We are aiming to better address and understand the underlying mechanisms of individual cognition, evaluation and response to the distribution of the costs and benefits of society (see Kluegel et al. 1995; Norton and Ariely 2011). Our panel at the 2013 ECPR General Conference Panel, “Dismantling Democracy: The Challenge of Inequality to Political Engagement,” was overflowing with submissions as well as audience members. We want to channel together this high and even growing interest across the discipline in the various aspects and implications of economic inequality in an academic venue with the strong possibility for future research. Inequality has received revived interest in the post-financial crisis period (after 2008). While the causes of income inequality are manifold and mainly revolve around increasing gaps in market and capital income, weakening redistributive effectiveness of taxation policies and in-kind benefits, changing household structures or less effective employment protection legislation and processes of globalization, there is widespread worry as well as an acknowledgment on its disturbing challenges to social cohesion and political stability. Rising inequality is known to be detrimental to social well-being (Wilkinson and Pickett 2009), democratic values such as social and political trust, and good government (Uslaner 2011; Rothstein 2011; Loveless forthcoming); and, in some cases, produces a differential impact on civic engagement in which the poor are the ‘losers’ (Solt 2008; Schlozman, Verba, Brady 2012). The ramifications for democracy (and political equality more broadly, Bartels 2008; Stiglitz 2012; Noah 2012) are clear; however, it is less clear understanding of why this happens at the individual-level. Extant theories tell us that inequality tends to be more costly to the poor and the rich tend to avoid suffering or even benefit from inequality. However, this approach assumes that national levels of objective inequality are evaluated uniformly within and differently between groups demarcated by income. While intuitive, these clear-cut relationships are less empirically obvious. For instance, despite some very good work (Solt 2008), other comparative studies corroborate that lower income groups in highly unequal societies perceive and react to economic inequality differently (i.e. high levels of inequality in highly unequal societies slightly mobilises the underprivileged, see Karakoc 2013). Therefore, if income is an increasingly less stable predictor of how people experience and thus respond to inequality, what are the origins of individuals’ perceptions and evaluations of inequality? Are they institutionally and culturally entrenched in societies to a certain extent or shaped by mass media in reporting on and framing inequality? In answering these questions, we can begin to address the political consequences of inequality at the individual-level. Thus, we seek to draw together those working on the political and social consequences of inequality in modern democracies by investigating the impact of economic inequality from the perspectives described in the five panels below. Dr. Armin Schäfer, researcher at the Max-Planck Institute of the Study of Societies, Cologne, will organise a panel on “Inequality and political involvement”. In many advanced democracies, turnout is not only falling but also growing unequal. At the same time, new forms of political participation have been instituted and grown increasingly popular. Many observers welcome this ongoing “democratization of democracy” but its downside could be a further decline of political equality. In this panel, he invites participants to address these parallel processes empirically and theoretically. Further panel or paper applicants are invited to submit proposals which broadly revolve around the ensuing research questions: A second panel on “Income inequality and voting” is intended to investigate to what extent inequality or rising levels of inequality, in fact, mostly affect the more disadvantaged groups in society or whether other differentials, e.g., between the affluent and the middle class, are more influential. A further rather institutional focus would scrutinize how different electoral systems could possibly attenuate its detrimental effects. A third panel on “Inequality, social capital and civil society” seeks to shed light on inequality’s implications for the development or availability of social trust, reciprocity, tolerance, co-operation, social cohesion and associational involvement. A fourth panel on “Institutional and ideological foundations of inequality and social justice” seeks to understand why perceptions and evaluations of inequality do not emerge uniformly across similar levels of inequality but seem to be strongly rooted in country-specific institutional settings, e.g., different welfare regimes, culturally shared belief systems of social justice, and variations in system justification. A fifth panel on “Perceptions of inequality and the role of the mass media” aims to investigate to what extent the formation of people’s perceptions and evaluation of economic inequality at the macro-level is related to available frames in the public discourse which are particularly designed and promulgated by the mass media as the mediator between politicians and the people.