Research increasingly shows that policy corresponds more closely to the preferences of affluent citizens than to those of lower-income groups. It brings together research on three sets of mechanisms: the stages of policymaking at which socioeconomic biases emerge; the socioeconomic backgrounds, careers and wealth of political representatives; and the structural and instrumental power of business and organized interests in affecting policy. The workshop seeks to move from documenting unequal responsiveness towards explaining when, where and through whose actions it is generated.
Across a growing number of affluent democracies, research finds that policy outcomes often correspond more closely to affluent citizens’ preferences than to those of lower-income groups (Bartels 2008; Gilens 2012; Mathisen et al. 2023). A parallel literature on fiscal politics examines whose material interests are served by changes in taxation, spending and redistribution and highlight the evoluation towards regressive taxation over past decades (Hope & Limberg 2022) . Although these literatures study different outcomes, they point to a shared puzzle: why does policymaking often give greater weight to the preferences and interests of economically advantaged groups?
Several explanations have been proposed, including inequalities in political participation, inequality in descriptive representation, and the greater resources of business and organized interests. Yet research on these mechanisms remains fragmented. Studies of politicians’ backgrounds investigate how their experiences and worldviews shape their priorities and behaviour in office. Research on lobbying and business power examines how organized interests secure access and influence. These literatures are rarely brought together under a common focus on socioeconomic bias in policymaking or connected systematically to the stages at which policy decisions are made.
This fragmentation limits our ability to explain when and how such biases arise. They may enter during coalition negotiations, policy formulation within government departments, legislative revision in parliamentary committees, or implementation and enforcement.
Some contributions to this workshop will come from research from our project on “Politicians, Policies, and the Reproduction of Wealth”
Alexiadou, Despina. 2022. “Cabinet Ministers and Inequality.” European Journal of Political Research 61 (2): 326–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/1475-6765.12482.
Bartels, Larry M. 2008. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton University Press.
Béland, Daniel, and Alex Waddan. 2015. “Breaking down Ideas and Institutions: The Politics of Tax Policy in the USA and the UK.” Policy Studies 36 (2): 176–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/01442872.2014.1000845.
Bell, Stephen, and Andrew Hindmoor. 2014. “The Structural Power of Business and the Power of Ideas: The Strange Case of the Australian Mining Tax.” New Political Economy 19 (3): 470–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/13563467.2013.796452.
Elsässer, Lea, Svenja Hense, and Armin Schäfer. 2021. “Not Just Money: Unequal Responsiveness in Egalitarian Democracies.” Journal of European Public Policy 28 (12): 1890–908. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2020.1801804.
Gilens, Martin. 2014. Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America. Princeton University Press.
Hope, David, and Julian Limberg. "The economic consequences of major tax cuts for the rich." *Socio-Economic Review* 20, no. 2 (2022): 539-559.
Lupu, N. and Tirado Castro, A. (2023) “Unequal policy responsiveness in Spain,” *Socio-Economic Review*, 21(3), pp. 1697–1720. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/ser/mwac040.
Mathisen, Ruben, Wouter Schakel, Svenja Hense, Lea Elsässer, Mikael Persson, and Jonas Pontusson. 2023. “Unequal Responsiveness and Government Partisanship in Northwest Europe.” In Unequal Democracies: Public Policy, Responsiveness, and Redistribution in an Era of Rising
Persson, M. and Sundell, A. (2023) “The Rich Have a Slight Edge: Evidence from Comparative Data on Income-Based Inequality in Policy Congruence,” *British Journal of Political Science*, pp. 1–12.
1: At what stages of post-electoral policymaking does unequal responsiveness emerge?
2: How do politicians’ socioeconomic backgrounds shape policy choices beyond party?
3: How does business acccess to politics through formal and/or informal channels influence policy?
4: How does policy visibility and salience affect the impact of business interest groups?
1: Mapping unequal responsiveness across stages of post-electoral policymaking
2: The effect of coalition bargaining on the socioeconomic bias in policymaking
3: Parliamentary committees and the effects of legislative revision
4: Implementation as source of unequal responsiveness
5: Politicians’ class backgrounds, occupations, wealth and policy behaviour
6: Business power, lobbying strategies and access to decision-makers as sources of a pro-wealth bias in policymaking
