inequality in democracy essay

Democracy and inequality

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Andrew yeo , andrew yeo senior fellow - foreign policy , center for asia policy studies , sk-korea foundation chair in korea studies @andrewiyeo teresa s. encarnacion tadem , teresa s. encarnacion tadem professor and executive director, center for integrative and development studies - university of the philippines diliman meredith l. weiss , meredith l. weiss professor, rockefeller college of public affairs & policy - university at albany, suny @merweissphd kok-hoe ng , and kok-hoe ng senior research fellow and head, case study unit - lee kuan yew school of public policy byunghwan son byunghwan son associate professor - george mason university @byunghwan_son.

December 2022

• 11 min read

Introduction

A key challenge to democracies in Asia is persistent or rising inequality. The diversity of cases in Asia — characterized by varying levels of economic and political performance — indicates, at best, a complicated relationship between inequality and democracy. To help address this issue, four scholars examine inequality and democratic governance in the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and South Korea and provide a set of policy prescriptions for policymakers, civil society, and the private sector. Although there is no one-size-fits-all solution, the case studies highlight several common challenges, such as the institutionalization of past unequal practices, and policy prescriptions, such as greater political decentralization. Taken collectively, the papers provide important insights and recommendations to combat inequality, with the aim of strengthening democracies in Asia.

The scholars were chiefly interested in economic inequality. However, in their assessments, they recognized other related dimensions of inequality, including limited or uneven access to education and government services, racial and ethnic inequality, and unequal access to the political process. Unsurprisingly, economic inequality is correlated with many others forms of inequality, which, in turn, limit democracy. For instance, the poor may not be able to exercise their right to vote to voice their concerns, whereas the rich may use their wealth and political connections to influence policy. Practitioners must therefore be mindful of how one form of inequality relates to other forms.

The scholars adopted a flexible understanding of democracy. However, there was greater emphasis on democratic governance given the wide variation in the quality of democracies in Asia. Procedural and normative conceptions of democracy were also considered to a lesser extent.

The Gini coefficients measuring inequality in the four countries ranged from 0.3 on the lower end to 0.5 on the higher end of the spectrum. Ordered from the highest to lowest degree of inequality are the Philippines (0.48), Malaysia (0.43), Singapore (0.40), and South Korea (0.31). 1 The Philippines and Malaysia are considered middle-income countries, and South Korea and Singapore are categorized as high-income countries. Even in a wealthy, highly democratic and low inequality society such as South Korea’s, perceptions of inequality can still linger, as depicted in popular Korean dramas and movies such as “Squid Games,” “Sky Castle,” and “Parasite.”

Challenges and recommendations

Despite wide economic and political variation among the four countries, several common challenges and policy recommendations were identified.

• Inequality is only loosely associated with weaker democracies. A loose correlation between inequality and reduced political freedoms (as measured by Freedom House index scores) can be identified when comparing the four countries. However, the fact that some nondemocracies in Asia are characterized by lower economic inequality (in other words, countries with low Gini coefficients) but limited political freedom, such as Cambodia, Myanmar, and Pakistan, indicates that there is no direct, linear relationship between inequality and democracy. Targeting inequality alone will therefore not necessarily improve democratic quality, as other variables such as corruption or racism also correlate with inequality and democracy.
• The problems of inequality and democratic decline are linked to deeper historical legacies and path dependent processes. For example, the dominance of political family dynasties (as seen in the Philippines) contributes to political inequality and corruption. And deep-rooted economic policies favoring particular ethnicities (as seen in Malaysia), as well as programs that single out specific demographic groups (as found in Singapore), lead to the marginalization and social stigmatism of targeted groups, which further contributes to inequality. Policies, both in their design and implementation, should therefore aim to not only fight inequality, but also gradually change public attitudes toward social welfare policies. Principles of universalism that contribute to normalizing access to public services are thus welcome.
• COVID-19 has exacerbated inequality in Asia, but it also provides a window of opportunity. The pandemic may have widened the gap between the rich and poor in Asian countries. However, governments could use the crisis to shift policy in a direction that helps alleviate rising inequality. For instance, in South Korea, the government could use its surplus fiscal capacity to support those small-business owners hit hardest by the pandemic. In the Philippines, additional revenue from a “wealth tax” applied to those at the highest income bracket could help cover the large cost of tackling the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Decentralization offers a means of addressing economic and political inequality. Three of the four papers advocate devolving political and economic processes from the national level to the regional and local levels. The rationale for decentralization may differ in each country, but it commonly helps to redistribute wealth and resources, enhance local political participation, and empower marginalized regions and populations.
• Improved data analysis and greater data transparency could help policymakers better understand and address problems of inequality and democracy. For example, further disaggregation of Bumiputera groups in Malaysian government statistics reveals disparities between peninsula Malays and other ethnic groups. Data disaggregation can help “refine categories and targets so that policy benefits reach the especially vulnerable segments.” The systemic collection of high-quality international data that can be easily compared, as well as increased data access for independent researchers, could help offer new insights and provide additional scrutiny of government policies. For instance, in Singapore, inequality indicators “should be calculated using all household income sources instead of work income only, as is current practice.”

Case study summaries

Philippines.

Raising the issue of inequality has been a major political challenge in the Philippines. Filipino politicians regularly mention poverty and corruption, but as Teresa S. Encarnacion Tadem notes, they rarely address class inequality and its effect on democracy, even though inequality in the country ranks among the highest in Asia. Tackling inequality would mean shedding an uncomfortable spotlight on political family dynasties and their dominance in Philippine political and economic life — a core factor perpetuating inequality and democratic weakness.

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To address the interrelated issues of inequality, corruption, and democracy, Tadem points to national and local efforts at decentralization. In particular, she reflects on the 1991 Local Government Code (LGC), a major decentralization policy that “sought to address inequality and empower people to take part in the decision-making process of their respective local government units.” In the spirit of the LGC, Tadem offers several remedies to address regional and class inequality. In the short term, the Philippine government could strengthen socioeconomic policies and nationwide social protection programs, such as the Universal Health Care Act and the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (more popularly known as the conditional cash transfer program) and “push for national programs that encourage popular participation.” In the longer term, Tadem advocates passing an anti-dynasty bill and levying higher taxes on the wealthy to help cover the large cost of addressing the COVID-19 pandemic.

In Malaysia, the relationship between inequality and democracy is also complicated and exacerbated by additional factors. As Meredith L. Weiss argues, “the tight interweaving of political stratification, racial identity, and economic interest in Malaysia” makes reducing inequality an “elusive target.” More specifically, the special status accrued to ethnic Malays and other indigenous communities vis-à-vis other groups (in other words, ethnic Chinese) has “rendered Malay political rights issues inseparable from economic issues.” And these issues have been made more acute by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Malaysia has made rapid economic progress in the past two decades. Its gross domestic product per capita nearly tripled during this period (excluding the 9% decline attributed to the pandemic), and its absolute poverty declined. Inequality has also steadily improved. However, other data point to more limited economic success. For instance, Weiss notes that “60% of the top 1% by income were Chinese and 33% were Bumiputera” in 2014. Although laws favoring the Bumiputera are unlikely to change, inequality can still be addressed by “prioritizing redistributive policies that benefit the many over the already-privileged few, and optimizing transparency and accountability in policy implementation and evaluation.” As a quick and immediate step, “given sharp disparities between peninsular Malays and other Bumiputera,” Weiss suggests disaggregating the Bumiputera in government statistics “to help refine categories and targets.” This step will help ensure that policy benefits reach the most vulnerable populations. In the longer term, institutional decentralization and the devolution of policy authority and fiscal resources could give those in more peripheral areas a greater voice, thereby enhancing democratic inclusivity.

Singapore remains an outlier. As Kok-Hoe Ng states, the country has an “enviable economic track record, high standards of social well-being, and a technically competent bureaucracy.” The public’s trust in government is also high. However, undemocratic practices persist, and Singapore’s pro-market approach to economic growth has resulted in greater inequality. Ng notes that “the top 1% own 32% of the wealth in the economy, while the bottom 50% own just 4%.” Although state intervention is generous in areas that encourage economic markets (for example, universal public education), welfare support for people toiling outside of these markets is minimal. Income (in)security and housing are two areas that highlight how neoliberal economics, existing political practices, and social policymaking hinder democratic growth in Singapore.

In light of these problems, Ng advocates changes in policy design, principles, and processes that could ultimately shift the mindset of Singapore’s relatively “high tolerance” for inequality. As he states, “Minor adjustments to policy design can amount to a shift in the policy paradigm if they are based on a consistent set of principles. From an equality perspective, the most important principles are espousing universalism, prioritizing needs, and normalizing access to public services.” Anti-welfare rhetoric could also be replaced with “policy rules and language that stress universal access and the importance of meeting needs.” Increased transparency would also strengthen policy accountability and efficacy. Greater access to information and the collection of high-quality, internationally comparable social and economic data for independent research and analysis could place checks on policymaking, particularly in polities such as Singapore where electoral competition remains limited.

South Korea

South Korea seems to present an ideal case in which inequality is relatively low and democratic governance and political freedoms are generally high. Moreover, somewhat contrary to popular beliefs, Byunghwan Son finds that economic inequality has not increased in recent years, nor have public perceptions of “unfairness.” However, although these and other data indicators suggest reason for optimism, a narrative of economic injustice seems to persist in popular media. If not managed carefully, Son warns of a potential democratic crisis created by perceptions of inequality, as evidenced by the importance of domestic economic issues in South Korea’s highly polarized 2022 presidential election. Most notable is the shortage in housing in and around Seoul, which reflects a deeper structural problem related to a growing wealth gap between the rich and poor.

To avoid a crisis, Son suggests maintaining, if not further improving, levels of income distribution through fiscal expansion. In the short term, more aggressive social spending is warranted given South Korea’s surplus fiscal capacity, as noted by the International Monetary Fund, and its below average spending compared to other member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. In particular, it would be prudent to further support those small-business owners hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic (and that comprise a significant portion of South Korea’s real economy). Also, instituting supply-driven housing policies could help staunch the surge in housing prices and reduce the wealth gap. In the longer term, “decentralization of the national economy, which is heavily centered around Seoul, needs to be more aggressively pursued.” Son argues that decentralization would help “ease up the asymmetric population pressure on the capital area and offer a structural solution to the wealth inequality problem.”

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The authors would like to thank McCall Mintzer, Adrien Chorn, and Jennifer Mason for their assistance with this project, Lori Merritt for editing, Chris Krupinski for layout, Rachel Slattery for web design, and Alexandra Dimsdale for assisting with the publication process.

• Gini coefficient scores are based on data from the World Economic Forum Inclusive Development Index. The scores provided reflect pre-COVID-19 levels. See “The Inclusive Development Index 2018: Summary and Data Highlights,” (Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2018), https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Forum_IncGrwth_2018.pdf .

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For democracy to work, racial inequalities must be addressed, Stanford scholars say

The Stanford Center for Racial Justice is taking a hard look at the policies perpetuating systemic racism in America today and asking how we can imagine a more equitable society.

Last summer, a profound racial reckoning swept the United States and, to some extent, the world. The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black Americans killed by the police, coupled with a pandemic disproportionately afflicting Black Americans, made the persistence of racism undeniable, says Stanford legal scholar Ralph Richard Banks .

Stanford Law Professor Ralph Richard Banks and Associate Dean for Public Service and Public Interest Law Diane Chin have established the Stanford Center for Racial Justice to address racial inequality and division in America. (Image credit: Courtesy Stanford Law School)

“It seems hard to argue against racial inequality in society. I think that has motivated people to want to do something and to ask, ‘Is this the society I want to live in?’ The question is, how long will people continue to have that sense of the urgency to do something?” said Banks, the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law at Stanford Law School (SLS).

That’s where the Stanford Center for Racial Justice (SCRJ) fits in. While situated within the law school, the aim of the SCRJ is to leverage the resources and capabilities of the broader university to further racial justice in ways that strengthen democracy.

Banks and Diane Chin , the associate dean for public service and public interest law and center’s acting director, launched the SCRJ in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement to help do the hard work of dismantling the policies and practices that perpetuate systemic racism and to identify solutions that could bring forth a more equitable world.

“Our goal is to create systems, policies, structures that ensure that racial barriers no longer persist,” Chin said, “and that each of us has a way to pursue and feel supported in pursuing the work that we want, living where we want, the schools we want for our children, healthcare access that is not racialized.”

Since the center launched in June 2020, Banks and Chin have been working tirelessly with faculty, students and outside organizations. To start, SCRJ is focusing on three areas where systemic change is urgently needed: criminal justice and policing, educational equity, and economic security and opportunity.

Some of those efforts are already underway.

This quarter, the SCRJ is working with the Graduate School of Education (GSE) to examine how to dismantle structural racism in the U.S. public school system and put an anti-racist education in its place. In a policy lab, The Youth Justice Lab: Imagining an Anti-Racist Public Education System, students from both the GSE and SLS are working with two nonprofit groups to develop specific policy and research interventions that can counter the racial disparities perpetuated by school programs, such as racially segregated academic placements (e.g. special education or advanced placement) and exclusionary school discipline policies.

Policy labs are a way for students to examine how such structures and systems can block or boost opportunity. In the practicums, students and their clients aim to craft new policies that policymakers can realistically roll out and fund because, as Chin observed, “That’s where the rubber hits the road. We can draft beautiful policies that are based on our values and our ideals – and that’s important – but they also have to be very practical to be implemented.”

Another recent policy lab explored at the intersection between law enforcement and race, specifically the role of policing in the local communities.

Last fall, students who took Selective De-Policing: Operationalizing Concrete Reforms (a collaboration with the Stanford Center for Criminal Justice) examined the various responsibilities of police, including their involvement in dealing with nonviolent issues, such as mental health, school discipline or homelessness. Students worked with the African American Mayors Association , a Washington D.C. organization that represents Black mayors across the country, to identify how cities might move some of their work away from armed, uninformed officers to other agencies and organizations that are better prepared to handle those situations in nonviolent ways. A report with their recommendations is set to publish later this year.

Tackling problems that transcend race

Because racial injustice crosscuts myriad problems in society, Banks said he hopes that the work the SCRJ does will also address issues that trouble people from all backgrounds and demographics.

“We’re using race to figure out how to address problems that transcend race. Racial injustices are emblematic of so many other problems we have,” he said.

Take policing for example, which Banks said is not working well for Black Americans nor for people of all races. “It raises questions about how we address not only crime but other problems like mental illness and homelessness because police officers have been used as a frontline for all these different problems.”

Banks acknowledges that it will take more than just a change in policy to inspire meaningful change; culture plays an important role too.

“The problems we confront are not problems that are going to be solved by the government alone,” said Banks. “The hardest thing, I think, is to recognize the ways that we are all implicated in the brokenness of our society.”

He added, “No matter how well-intentioned we are, we are all kind of the problem. The problems wouldn’t be as big as they are if we weren’t all contributing to them.”

Society cannot work without addressing the racial disparities that undermine the functioning of its democratic and social institutions, he added. “The challenge of racial justice is actually the challenge of democracy because we can’t make society work unless we can address racial division, distrust, inequality and racism.”

SCRJ is hosting periodic lectures over Zoom – titled “Tuesday Race Talks” – that are open to members of the public. The next event will be held Feb. 23 at 12:45 p.m. and will feature Steve Philips, a national political leader, civil rights lawyer and podcast host, who will talk on the state of Black politics.

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2 Is Inequality a Threat to Democracy?

• Published: October 2009
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Many believe that the government bears an active role and responsibility on how wealth and income are generated and distributed. With the rapid increase in income inequality in a number of the advanced democracies, it has now become a concern on whether or not this should be considered as a threat. This chapter first examines what types of equality brings concern to the people. An outline of a normative theory of legitimacy which roots regime legitimacy in the satisfaction of an “interest tracking” condition and a political theory suggesting how income inequality can weaken democratic rule is then given.

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Democracy, Redistribution and Inequality

In this paper we revisit the relationship between democracy, redistribution and inequality. We first explain the theoretical reasons why democracy is expected to increase redistribution and reduce inequality, and why this expectation may fail to be realized when democracy is captured by the richer segments of the population; when it caters to the preferences of the middle class; or when it opens up disequalizing opportunities to segments of the population previously excluded from such activities, thus exacerbating inequality among a large part of the population. We then survey the existing empirical literature, which is both voluminous and full of contradictory results. We provide new and systematic reduced-form evidence on the dynamic impact of democracy on various outcomes. Our findings indicate that there is a significant and robust effect of democracy on tax revenues as a fraction of GDP, but no robust impact on inequality. We also find that democracy is associated with an increase in secondary schooling and a more rapid structural transformation. Finally, we provide some evidence suggesting that inequality tends to increase after democratization when the economy has already undergone significant structural transformation, when land inequality is high, and when the gap between the middle class and the poor is small. All of these are broadly consistent with a view that is different from the traditional median voter model of democratic redistribution: democracy does not lead to a uniform decline in post-tax inequality, but can result in changes in fiscal redistribution and economic structure that have ambiguous effects on inequality.

Prepared for the Handbook of Income Distribution edited by Anthony Atkinson and François Bourguignon. We are grateful to the editors for their detailed comments on an earlier draft and to participants in the Handbook conference in Paris, particularly to our discussant José-Víctor Ríos-Rull. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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Handbook of Income Distribution Volume 2, 2015, Pages 1885–1966 Handbook of Income Distribution Cover image Chapter 21 – Democracy, Redistribution, and Inequality Daron Acemoglu*, Suresh Naidu†, Pascual Restrepo*, James A. Robinson‡

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Wealth inequality and democracy

• Published: 05 July 2023
• Volume 197 , pages 89–136, ( 2023 )

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• Sutirtha Bagchi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0022-981X 1 &
• Matthew J. Fagerstrom 2  

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Scholars have studied the relationship between land inequality, income inequality, and democracy extensively, but have reached contradictory conclusions that have resulted from competing theories and methodologies. However, despite its importance, the effects of wealth inequality on democracy have not been examined empirically. We use a panel dataset of billionaire wealth from 1987 to 2012 to determine the impact of wealth inequality on the level of democracy. We measure democracy using Polity scores, Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) indices, and the continuous Machine Learning index. We find limited empirical support for the hypothesis that overall wealth inequality or inherited wealth inequality has an impact on democracy. However, we find evidence that politically connected wealth inequality lowers V-Dem and Machine Learning democracy scores. Following Boix (Democracy and redistribution, Cambridge University Press, New York, 2003), we investigate the hypothesis that capital mobility moderates the relationship between wealth inequality and democracy and find evidence that increased capital mobility mitigates the negative impact of politically connected wealth inequality on democracy.

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The Relationship Between Income Inequality and Economic Growth: Are Transmission Channels Effective?

The KOF Globalisation Index – revisited

Financial development and income inequality: a panel data approach.

Krieger and Meierrieks ( 2016 ) investigate the relationship between inequality and economic freedom, rather than democracy.

We have four groups of billionaires: self-made and politically unconnected (e.g. Bill Gates), self-made and politically connected (e.g. Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich), inherited and politically unconnected (e.g. David Rockefeller), and inherited and politically connected (e.g. the sons of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri).

We could also consider the political agency of poor voters, who may prefer democracy if inequality is high if they think they can influence the choice of policies that will address inequality. Absent such a belief, they may not seek democracy, believing that it is ineffective in resolving inequality (Krieckhaus et al., 2014 ). Empirically, there is evidence that high levels of inequality depress voter turnout (Dash et al., 2023 ).

The use of continuous measures of democracy is important for this point; to the extent that fundamental rights to political participation are still present, we might see a decline in the quality of democracy without seeing a transition to outright autocracy.

For this result, we are using politically connected billionaire wealth as a share of GDP.

For a similar exposition of how a rising bourgeoisie class led to a push towards dismantling rent-seeking and demands for political participation in the case of Ancien Régime France, see Ekelund and Thornton ( 2020 ).

Tullock ( 1986 ) anticipates this point, noting that in the typical dictatorship or monarchy, it is common to find a great deal of rent seeking activity and the “granting of monopolies of one sort or another to friends of the ruler is very common and one of the major forms of enterprise is to ‘court’ the ruler in hopes of getting such special privileges.”

See also: https://www.nytimes.com/1993/10/01/business/worldbusiness/IHT-a-giant-joins-jakarta-exchange.html which describes the Indonesian business environment in the following dire terms: “All the really big conglomerates in Indonesia have strong political connections. That is how they get favorable contracts and concessions from the government and loans from state banks.”

These regime characteristics can also be redundant, which can artificially increase or decrease a country’s Polity score relative to a hypothetical “true” level of democracy.

On the other hand, many theories of the relationship between inequality and democracy posit that the links are between inequality and particular aspects of democracy, for instance, the ability of the poor to vote for redistribution. In this case, using broad measures of democracy may mask the “true” impact of inequality on democracy by mixing different concepts of democracy together (Knutsen & Dahlum, 2022 ).

More specifically, the Electoral Democracy index measures the foundational aspects of democracy, such as freedom of association and expression, voting rights, free and fair elections, and elections for the executive (Coppedge et al., 2022b ).

We find it important to note that the Egalitarian Democracy index is not mechanically related to our measure of wealth inequality. The egalitarian component of the index consists of three sub-indexes. The equal protection index measures the extent to which the law equally protects citizens across social groups and classes. The equal access index measures the de facto ability of all people to actively participate in government. The equal distribution of resources index measures how government welfare and infrastructure expenditures, education, and healthcare are distributed in society (Coppedge et al., 2022b ). No component of the Egalitarian Democracy index measures the distribution of privately owned assets or wealth.

V-Dem’s conceptualization of democracy is also narrower than Polity’s. It includes fewer components and hence is less likely to overlap with other institutional outcomes, such as the rule of law or corruption.

For the codebook and methodology, see Coppedge et al. ( 2022b , 2022c ).

Polity and V-Dem scores are generated using different processes. While Polity uses in-house experts that code all countries using country-specific reports, V-Dem uses observational data, expert surveys, and in-house experts (Skaaning, 2018 ).

Restrictions on suffrage or institutional rules that make voting onerous are one such potential mechanism. To the extent that increased voter turnout increases top marginal tax rates (Sabet, 2023 ) economic elites may have incentives to lobby for rules that make voting more difficult in order to protect their incomes.

Myanmar’s 2008 constitution provides a great example of this phenomenon. As Nehru ( 2015 ) notes, it included several provisions to ensure that the reins of power remained firmly in the hands of the military, chief among them being “Article 436 that gives the military one-quarter of the seats in the upper and lower houses of the national parliament and one-third of the seats in the state/regional parliaments. In addition, because constitutional amendments must receive more than 75 percent of the vote in parliament, the military’s mandated 25 percent presence gives it effective veto power over any proposed changes.”

Our results for overall wealth inequality are robust to dropping these countries.

Although we operationalize wealth inequality by normalizing billionaire wealth by GDP throughout the paper, we also present results obtained by normalizing billionaire wealth by population and the country’s capital stock in Online Appendix Tables A.7 and A.8.

A full classification of billionaires into the two categories of politically connected and politically unconnected is available from the authors on request.

https://www.forbes.com/billionaires2002/LIRKZ32.html .

https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/moscow/potanin.html .

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1986/04/27/corruption-issue-could-cloud-suhartos-impressive-record/49e076d5-a764-464e-b314-1f212a06b352/ .

Fisman ( 2001 ) attempts to quantify the value of political connections and finds Indonesia to be especially fertile territory. It obtains estimates of the value of such connections by exploiting a string of rumors about President Suharto’s health during his last few years in office. The paper scores the companies affiliated with “longtime Suharto allies", the Salim Group run by Liem Sioe Liong and the Barito Pacific Group run by Prajogo Pangestu, as five on a scale of five—the highest score that it also assigns to companies associated with President Suharto’s children. Thus our classifications of Indonesian billionaires, while undertaken independently, are consistent with those in a very well-cited paper that examines political connections.

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2020/10/adelsons-set-new-donation-record .

A higher rank on the Corruption Perceptions Index indicates that a country is perceived as being more corrupt by experts knowledgeable about the country. In the 2019 rankings by Transparency International, Denmark and New Zealand shared the 1st spot and were viewed as the least corrupt countries in the world whereas Yemen, Syria, South Sudan, and Somalia were perceived as the most corrupt countries in the world.

This list is calculated using the average of politically connected wealth inequality in years where these countries had at least one billionaire. These results are comparable to those found in Bagchi and Svejnar ( 2015 ) (refer Table A2, p. 528).

Furthermore, in a univariate regression between politically connected wealth as a share of GDP and either the proportion of firms that are politically connected or the fraction of market capitalization represented by politically connected firms, the regression coefficients are significant at the 5% level (or higher) and additionally, the values of R-squared, with just a single variable included, exceed 0.40. Those additional regressions provide further assurance that our measure of politically connected wealth inequality is reasonable as it lines up well with measures in Faccio ( 2006 )—a well-cited paper that arrives at political connections using an entirely different approach.

We note though that in many constitutional monarchies, the monarch or other royals are often legally unable to put the institutional wealth of the crown for personal use. For example, in the United Kingdom the Crown Estate manages the property of the King but they note that "it is not the private property of the monarch —it cannot be sold by the monarch, nor do revenues from it belong to the monarch."

The Kernel Density of KAOPEN can be found in the bottom panel of Fig.  2 .

The choice of 1996 is motivated by a change in the way Forbes covered billionaire wealth in 1997. As Bagchi and Svejnar ( 2015 ) explains: “ Forbes magazine changed its editorial policy for four years, between 1997 and 2000. In these years, they included only those billionaires who were either self-made (e.g., Warren Buffett) or those who inherited their wealth and were actively managing it themselves (e.g., Carlos Slim Helu of Mexico). This leads to the exclusion of billionaires from around the world who simply inherited their wealth and were no longer actively involved themselves in growing their businesses, such as the duPonts and Rockefellers in the U.S. [...] Given this limitation of the 1997 list, we use the 1996 list instead." Because we are interested in how inherited wealth inequality impacts democracy, it is important that we include all inherited billionaires and not just those who are actively managing their fortunes.

As can be seen from Online Appendix Table A.2, our results are robust to dropping such countries.

Section 1 in the Online Appendix lists all of the controls, including their justification for inclusion.

However, we also confirm that all our results are robust to the use of random effects specifications.

These null results hold when we limit our sample to only those countries that have had billionaires at least once. See Online Appendix Table A.1.

A 5.5 percentage point increase in wealth inequality implies a decline in V-Dem scores of \(5.5*(-0.00391+(0.00899*0.166)) = -0.0133\) points. A decline in V-Dem scores of 0.031 points implies that \(0.0133/0.031 = 0.43\) , or 43 percent of the decline in V-Dem scores can be explained by politically connected wealth inequality.

We use Polity as our threshold for sample selection because although the translation from a continuous to a dichotomous measure of democracy is ad-hoc (Gründler & Krieger, 2022 ) we want to base our sample selection on a democracy measure which is not related to our inequality measure. We replicate these results using the dichotomous Machine Learning index in Online Appendix Table A.4.

Over that same time period, overall billionaire wealth in South Africa increased from 2.79 to 4.07 percent of GDP.

In additional checks not included in the paper, we confirm that our baseline results in Table 3 survive the introduction of each measure of wealth inequality or income inequality from the WID, such as the top percentile wealth share, the top decile wealth share, the Gini coefficient of wealth, etc. as controls.

See Online Appendix Tables A.9 and A.10 for overall, A.11 and A.12 for inherited, and A.13 and A.14 for politically connected wealth inequality results. Table A.15 shows that the results for politically connected wealth inequality hold for democracies as well.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Peter Calcagno, Joshua Hall, Christopher Kilby, Laura Meinzen-Dick, Olukunle Owolabi, Daniel Treisman, two anonymous referees, and participants at a session of the 2019 National Tax Association Conference for their helpful comments.

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Richer and Poorer

By Jill Lepore

For about a century, economic inequality has been measured on a scale, from zero to one, known as the Gini index and named after an Italian statistician, Corrado Gini, who devised it in 1912, when he was twenty-eight and the chair of statistics at the University of Cagliari. If all the income in the world were earned by one person and everyone else earned nothing, the world would have a Gini index of one. If everyone in the world earned exactly the same income, the world would have a Gini index of zero. The United States Census Bureau has been using Gini’s measurement to calculate income inequality in America since 1947. Between 1947 and 1968, the U.S. Gini index dropped to .386, the lowest ever recorded. Then it began to climb.

Income inequality is greater in the United States than in any other democracy in the developed world. Between 1975 and 1985, when the Gini index for U.S. households rose from .397 to .419, as calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau, the Gini indices of the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden, and Finland ranged roughly between .200 and .300, according to national data analyzed by Andrea Brandolini and Timothy Smeeding. But historical cross-country comparisons are difficult to make; the data are patchy, and different countries measure differently. The Luxembourg Income Study, begun in 1983, harmonizes data collected from more than forty countries on six continents. According to the L.I.S.’s adjusted data, the United States has regularly had the highest Gini index of any affluent democracy. In 2013, the U.S. Census Bureau reported a Gini index of .476.

The evidence that income inequality in the United States has been growing for decades and is greater than in any other developed democracy is not much disputed. It is widely known and widely studied. Economic inequality has been an academic specialty at least since Gini first put chalk to chalkboard. In the nineteen-fifties, Simon Kuznets, who went on to win a Nobel Prize, used tax data to study the shares of income among groups, an approach that was further developed by the British economist Anthony Atkinson, beginning with his 1969 paper “On the Measurement of Inequality,” in the Journal of Economic Theory . Last year’s unexpected popular success of the English translation of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-first Century” drew the public’s attention to measurements of inequality, but Piketty’s work had long since reached American social scientists, especially through a 2003 paper that he published with the Berkeley economist Emmanuel Saez, in The Quarterly Journal of Economics . Believing that the Gini index underestimates inequality, Piketty and Saez favor Kuznets’s approach. (Atkinson, Piketty, Saez, and Facundo Alvaredo are also the creators of the World Top Incomes Database, which collects income-share data from more than twenty countries.) In “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-1998,” Piketty and Saez used tax data to calculate what percentage of income goes to the top one per cent and to the top ten per cent. In 1928, the top one per cent earned twenty-four per cent of all income; in 1944, they earned eleven per cent, a rate that began to rise in the nineteen-eighties. By 2012, according to Saez’s updated data, the top one per cent were earning twenty-three per cent of the nation’s income, almost the same ratio as in 1928, although it has since dropped slightly.

Political scientists are nearly as likely to study economic inequality as economists are, though they’re less interested in how much inequality a market can bear than in how much a democracy can bear, and here the general thinking is that the United States is nearing its breaking point. In 2001, the American Political Science Association formed a Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy; a few years later, it concluded that growing economic inequality was threatening fundamental American political institutions. In 2009, Oxford University Press published both a seven-hundred-page “Handbook of Economic Inequality” and a collection of essays about the political consequences of economic inequality whose argument is its title: “The Unsustainable American State.” There’s a global version of this argument, too. “Inequality Matters,” a 2013 report by the United Nations, took the view—advanced by the economist Joseph Stiglitz in his book “The Price of Inequality”—that growing income inequality is responsible for all manner of political instability, as well as for the slowing of economic growth worldwide. Last year, when the Pew Research Center conducted a survey about which of five dangers people in forty-four countries consider to be the “greatest threat to the world,” many of the countries polled put religious and ethnic hatred at the top of their lists, but Americans and many Europeans chose inequality.

What’s new about the chasm between the rich and the poor in the United States, then, isn’t that it’s growing or that scholars are studying it or that people are worried about it. What’s new is that American politicians of all spots and stripes are talking about it, if feebly: inequality this, inequality that. In January, at a forum sponsored by Freedom Partners (a free-market advocacy group with ties to the Koch brothers), the G.O.P. Presidential swains Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio battled over which of them disliked inequality more, agreeing only that its existence wasn’t their fault. “The top one per cent earn a higher share of our income, nationally, than any year since 1928,” Cruz said, drawing on the work of Saez and Piketty. Cruz went on, “I chuckle every time I hear Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton talk about income inequality, because it’s increased dramatically under their policies.” No doubt there has been a lot of talk. “Let’s close the loopholes that lead to inequality by allowing the top one per cent to avoid paying taxes on their accumulated wealth,” Obama said during his State of the Union address. Speaker of the House John Boehner countered that “the President’s policies have made income inequality worse.”

The reason Democrats and Republicans are fighting over who’s to blame for growing economic inequality is that, aside from a certain amount of squabbling, it’s no longer possible to deny that it exists—a development that’s not to be sneezed at, given the state of the debate on climate change. That’s not to say the agreement runs deep; in fact, it couldn’t be shallower. The causes of income inequality are much disputed; so are its costs. And knowing the numbers doesn’t appear to be changing anyone’s mind about what, if anything, should be done about it.

Robert Putnam’s new book, “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis” (Simon & Schuster), is an attempt to set the statistics aside and, instead, tell a story. “Our Kids” begins with the story of the town where Putnam grew up, Port Clinton, Ohio. Putnam is a political scientist, but his argument is historical—it’s about change over time—and fuelled, in part, by nostalgia. “My hometown was, in the 1950s, a passable embodiment of the American Dream,” he writes, “a place that offered decent opportunity for all the kids in town, whatever their background.” Sixty years later, Putnam says, Port Clinton “is a split-screen American nightmare, a community in which kids from the wrong side of the tracks that bisect the town can barely imagine the future that awaits the kids from the right side of the tracks.”

Inequality-wise, Port Clinton makes a reasonable Middletown. According to the American Community Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, Port Clinton’s congressional district, Ohio’s ninth, has a Gini index of .467, which is somewhat lower than the A.C.S.’s estimate of the national average. But “Our Kids” isn’t a book about the Gini index. “Some of us learn from numbers, but more of us learn from stories,” according to an appendix that Putnam co-wrote with Jennifer M. Silva. Putnam, the author of “Bowling Alone,” is the director of the Saguaro Seminar for civic engagement at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government; Silva, a sociologist, has been a postdoctoral fellow there. In her 2013 book “Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty” (Oxford), Silva reported the results of interviews she conducted with a hundred working-class adults in Lowell, Massachusetts and Richmond, Virginia, described her account of the structural inequalities that shape their lives as “a story of institutions—not individuals or their families,” and argued that those inequalities are the consequence of the past half century’s “massive effort to roll back social protections from the market.” For “Our Kids,” Silva visited Robert Putnam’s home town and interviewed young people and their parents. Putnam graduated from Port Clinton High School in 1959. The surviving members of his class are now in their mid-seventies. Putnam and Silva sent them questionnaires; seventy-five people returned them. Silva also spent two years interviewing more than a hundred young adults in nine other cities and counties across the nation. As Putnam and Silva note, Silva conducted nearly all of the interviews Putnam uses in his book.

“Our Kids” is a heartfelt portrait of four generations: Putnam’s fellow 1959 graduates and their children, and the kids in Port Clinton and those nine other communities today and their parents. The book tells more or less the same story that the numbers tell; it’s just got people in it. Specifically, it’s got kids: the kids Putnam used to know, and, above all, the kids Silva interviewed. The book proceeds from the depressing assumption that presenting the harrowing lives of poor young people is the best way to get Americans to care about poverty.

Putnam has changed the names of all his subjects and removed certain identifying details. He writes about them as characters. First, there’s Don. He went to Port Clinton High School with Putnam. His father worked two jobs: an eight-hour shift at Port Clinton Manufacturing, followed by seven and a half hours at a local canning plant. A minister in town helped Don apply to university. “I didn’t know I was poor until I went to college,” Don says. He graduated from college, became a minister, and married a high-school teacher; they had one child, who became a high-school librarian. Libby, another member of Putnam’s graduating class, was the sixth of ten children. Like Don’s parents, neither of Libby’s parents finished high school. Her father worked at Standard Products, a factory on Maple Street that made many different things out of rubber, from weather stripping to tank treads. Libby won a scholarship to the University of Toledo, but dropped out to get married and have kids. Twenty years later, after a divorce, she got a job as a clerk in a lumberyard, worked her way up to becoming a writer for a local newspaper, and eventually ran for countywide office and won.

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All but two of the members of Putnam’s graduating class were white. Putnam’s wistfulness toward his childhood home town is at times painful to read. The whiteness of Port Clinton in the nineteen-fifties was not mere happenstance but the consequence of discriminatory housing and employment practices. I glanced through the records of the Ohio chapter of the N.A.A.C.P., which included a branch in Port Clinton. The Ohio chapter’s report for 1957 chronicles, among other things, its failed attempt to gain passage of statewide Fair Housing legislation; describes how “cross burnings occurred in many cities in Ohio”; recounts instances of police brutality, including in Columbus, where a patrolman beat a woman “with the butt of his pistol all over her face and body”; and states that in Toledo, Columbus, “and in a number of other communities, the Association intervened in situations where violence flared up or was threatened when Negro families moved into formerly ‘all-white neighborhoods.’ ” Thurgood Marshall, the director of the N.A.A.C.P.’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund, spoke in Ohio in 1958, after which a sympathetic Cleveland newspaper wrote that Marshall “will never be named to the Supreme Court.” In 1960, the Ohio N.A.A.C.P. launched a statewide voter-registration drive. One pamphlet asked, “Are you permitted to live wherever you please in any Ohio City?” Putnam acknowledges that there was a lot of racism in Port Clinton, but he suggests that, whatever hardships the two black kids in his class faced because they were black, the American dream was nevertheless theirs. This fails to convince. As one of those two kids, now grown, tells Putnam, “Your then was not my then, and your now isn’t even my now.”

In any case, the world changed, and Port Clinton changed with it. “Most of the downtown shops of my youth stand empty and derelict,” Putnam writes. In the late nineteen-sixties, the heyday of the Great Society, when income inequality in the United States was as low as it has ever been, the same was probably true of Port Clinton. But in the nineteen-seventies the town’s manufacturing base collapsed. Standard Products laid off more than half of its workers. In 1993, the plant closed. Since then, unemployment has continued to rise and wages to fall. Between 1999 and 2013, the percentage of children in Port Clinton living in poverty rose from ten to forty.

Silva found David hanging out in a park. His father, currently in prison, never had a steady job. David’s parents separated when he was a little boy. He bounced around, attending seven elementary schools. When he was thirteen, he was arrested for robbery. He graduated from high school only because he was given course credit for hours he’d worked at Big Boppers Diner (from which he was fired after graduation). In 2012, when David was eighteen, he got his girlfriend pregnant. “I’ll never get ahead,” he posted on his Facebook page last year, after his girlfriend left him. “I’m FUCKING DONE .”

Wealthy newcomers began arriving in the nineteen-nineties. On the shores of Lake Erie, just a few miles past Port Clinton’s trailer parks, they built mansions and golf courses and gated communities. “Chelsea and her family live in a large white home with a wide porch overlooking the lake,” Putnam writes, introducing another of his younger characters. Chelsea was the president of her high school’s student body and editor of the yearbook. Her mother, Wendy, works part time; her father, Dick, is a businessman. In the basement of their house, Wendy and Dick had a “1950s-style diner” built so that Chelsea and her brother would have a place to hang out with their friends. When Chelsea’s brother got a bad grade in school, Wendy went all the way to the school board to get it changed. Chelsea and her brother are now in college. Wendy does not appear to believe in welfare. “You have to work if you want to get rich,” she says. “If my kids are going to be successful, I don’t think they should have to pay other people who are sitting around doing nothing for their success.”

Aside from the anecdotes, the bulk of “Our Kids” is an omnibus of social-science scholarship. The book’s chief and authoritative contribution is its careful presentation for a popular audience of important work on the erosion, in the past half century, of so many forms of social, economic, and political support for families, schools, and communities—with consequences that amount to what Silva and others have called the “privatization of risk.” The social-science literature includes a complicated debate about the relationship between inequality of outcome (differences of income and of wealth) and inequality of opportunity (differences in education and employment). To most readers, these issues are more familiar as a political disagreement. In American politics, Democrats are more likely to talk about both kinds of inequality, while Republicans tend to confine their concern to inequality of opportunity. According to Putnam, “All sides in this debate agree on one thing, however: as income inequality expands, kids from more privileged backgrounds start and probably finish further and further ahead of their less privileged peers, even if the rate of socioeconomic mobility is unchanged.” He also takes the position, again relying on a considerable body of scholarship, that, “quite apart from the danger that the opportunity gap poses to American prosperity, it also undermines our democracy.” Chelsea is interested in politics. David has never voted.

The American dream is in crisis, Putnam argues, because Americans used to care about other people’s kids and now they only care about their own kids. But, he writes, “America’s poor kids do belong to us and we to them. They are our kids.” This is a lot like his argument in “Bowling Alone.” In high school in Port Clinton, Putnam was in a bowling league; he regards bowling leagues as a marker of community and civic engagement; bowling leagues are in decline; hence, Americans don’t take care of one another anymore. “Bowling Alone” and “Our Kids” also have the same homey just-folksiness. And they have the same shortcomings. If you don’t miss bowling leagues or all-white suburbs where women wear aprons—if Putnam’s then was not your then and his now isn’t your now—his well-intentioned “we” can be remarkably grating.

In story form, the argument of “Our Kids” is that while Wendy and Dick were building a fifties-style diner for their kids in the basement of their lakefront mansion, grade-grubbing with their son’s teachers, and glue-gunning the decorations for their daughter’s prom, every decent place to hang out in Port Clinton closed its doors, David was fired from his job at Big Boppers, and he got his girlfriend pregnant because, by the time David and Chelsea were born, in the nineteen-nineties, not only was Standard Products out of business but gone, too, was the sense of civic obligation and commonweal—everyone caring about everyone else’s kids—that had made it possible for Don and Libby to climb out of poverty in the nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-sixties. “Nobody gave a shit,” David says. And he’s not wrong.

“Our Kids” is a passionate, urgent book. It also has a sad helplessness. Putnam tells a story teeming with characters and full of misery but without a single villain. This is deliberate. “This is a book without upper-class villains,” he insists in the book’s final chapter. In January, Putnam tweeted, “My new book ‘Our Kids’ shows a growing gap between rich kids and poor kids. We’ll work with all sides on solutions.” It’s easier to work with all sides if no side is to blame. But Putnam’s eagerness to influence Congress has narrative consequences. If you’re going to tell a story about bad things happening to good people, you’ve got to offer an explanation, and, when you make your arguments through characters, your reader will expect that explanation in the form of characters. I feel bad for Chelsea. But I feel worse for David. Am I supposed to hate Wendy?

Some people make arguments by telling stories; other people make arguments by counting things. Charles Dickens was a story man. In “Hard Times” (1854), a novel written when statistics was on the rise, Dickens’s villain, Thomas Gradgrind, was a numbers man, “a man of facts and calculations,” who named one of his sons Adam Smith and another Malthus. “With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, Sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.”

Numbers men are remote and cold of heart, Dickens thought. But, of course, the appeal of numbers lies in their remoteness and coldness. Numbers depersonalize; that remains one of their chief claims to authority, and to a different explanatory force than can be found in, say, a poem. “Quantification is a technology of distance,” as the historian of science Theodore Porter has pointed out. “Reliance on numbers and quantitative manipulation minimizes the need for intimate knowledge and personal trust.” It’s difficult to understand something like income inequality across large populations and to communicate your understanding of it across vast distances without counting. But quantification’s lack of intimacy is also its weakness; it represents not only a gain but also a loss of knowledge.

Corrado Gini, he of the Gini index, was a numbers man, at a time when statistics had become a modern science. In 1925, four years after Gini wrote “Measurement of Inequality of Incomes,” he signed the “Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals” (he was the only statistician to do so) and was soon running the Presidential Commission for the Study of Constitutional Reforms. As Jean-Guy Prévost reported in “A Total Science: Statistics in Liberal and Fascist Italy” (2009), Gini’s work was so closely tied to the Fascist state that, in 1944, after the regime fell, he was tried for being an apologist for Fascism. In the shadow of his trial, he joined the Movimento Unionista Italiano, a political party whose objective was to annex Italy to the United States. “This would solve all of Italy’s problems,” the movement’s founder, Santi Paladino, told a reporter for Time . (“Paladino has never visited the U.S., though his wife Francesca lived 24 years in The Bronx,” the magazine noted.) But, for Gini, the movement’s purpose was to provide him with some anti-Fascist credentials.

The story of Gini is a good illustration of the problem with stories, which is that they personalize (which is also their power). His support for Fascism doesn’t mean that the Gini index isn’t valuable. It is valuable. The life of Corrado Gini can’t be used to undermine all of statistical science. Still, if you wanted to write an indictment of statistics as an instrument of authoritarian states, and if you had a great deal of other evidence to support that indictment—including other stories and, ideally, numbers—why yes, Gini would be an excellent character to introduce in Chapter 1.

Because stories contain one kind of truth and numbers another, many writers mix and match, telling representative stories and backing them up with aggregate data. Putnam, though, doesn’t so much mix and match as split the difference. He tells stories about kids but presents data about the economy. That’s why “Our Kids” has heaps of victims but not a single villain. “We encounter Elijah in a dingy shopping mall on the north side of Atlanta, during his lunch break from a job packing groceries,” Putnam writes. “Elijah is thin and small in stature, perhaps five foot seven, and wears baggy clothes that bulk his frame: jeans belted low around his upper thighs, a pair of Jordans on his feet.” As for why Elijah is packing groceries, the book offers not characters—there are no interviews, for instance, with members of the Georgia legislature or the heads of national corporations whose businesses have left Atlanta—but numbers, citing statistics about the city (“Large swaths of southern and western Atlanta itself are over 95 percent black, with child poverty rates ranging from 50 percent to 80 percent”) and providing a series of charts reporting the results of studies about things like class differences in parenting styles and in the frequency of the family dinner.

In “The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power” (Little, Brown), Steve Fraser fumes that what’s gone wrong with political discourse in America is that the left isn’t willing to blame anyone for anything anymore. There used to be battle cries. No more kings! Down with fat cats! Damn the moneycrats! Like Putnam’s argument, Fraser’s is both historical and nostalgic. Fraser longs for the passion and force with which Americans of earlier generations attacked aggregated power. Think of the way Frederick Douglass wrote about slavery, Ida B. Wells wrote about lynching, Ida Tarbell wrote about Standard Oil, Upton Sinclair wrote about the meatpacking industry, and Louis Brandeis wrote about the money trust. These people weren’t squeamish about villains.

To chronicle the rise of acquiescence, Fraser examines two differences between the long nineteenth century and today. “The first Gilded Age, despite its glaring inequities, was accompanied by a gradual rise in the standard of living; the second by a gradual erosion,” he writes. In the first Gilded Age, everyone from reporters to politicians apparently felt comfortable painting plutocrats as villains; in the second, this is, somehow, forbidden. “If the first Gilded Age was full of sound and fury,” he writes, “the second seemed to take place in a padded cell.” Fraser argues that while Progressive Era muckrakers ended the first Gilded Age by drawing on an age-old tradition of dissent to criticize prevailing economic, social, and political arrangements, today’s left doesn’t engage in dissent; it engages in consent, urging solutions that align with neoliberalism, technological determinism, and global capitalism: “Environmental despoiling arouses righteous eating; cultural decay inspires charter schools; rebellion against work becomes work as a form of rebellion; old-form anticlericalism morphs into the piety of the secular; the break with convention ends up as the politics of style; the cri de coeur against alienation surrenders to the triumph of the solitary; the marriage of political and cultural radicalism ends in divorce.” Why not blame the financial industry? Why not blame the Congress that deregulated it? Why not blame the system itself? Because, Fraser argues, the left has been cowed into silence on the main subject at hand: “What we could not do, what was not even speakable, was to tamper with the basic institutions of financial capitalism.”

Putnam closes “Our Kids” with a chapter called “What Is to Be Done?” Tampering with the basic institutions of financial capitalism is not on his to-do list. The chapter includes one table, one chart, many stories, and this statement: “The absence of personal villains in our stories does not mean that no one is at fault.” At fault are “social policies that reflect collective decisions,” and, “insofar as we have some responsibility for those collective decisions, we are implicated by our failure to address removable barriers to others’ success.” What can Putnam’s “we” do? He proposes changes in four realms: family structure, parenting, school, and community. His policy recommendations include expanding the earned-income tax credit and protecting existing anti-poverty programs; implementing more generous parental leaves, better child-care programs, and state-funded preschool; equalizing the funding of public schools, providing more community-based neighborhood schools, and increasing support for vocational high-school programs and for community colleges; ending pay-to-play extracurricular activities in public schools and developing mentorship programs that tie schools to communities and community organizations.

All of these ideas are admirable, many are excellent, none are new, and, at least at the federal level, few are achievable. The American political imagination has become as narrow as the gap between rich and poor is wide.

“Inequality: What Can Be Done?,” by Anthony Atkinson, will be published this spring (Harvard). Atkinson is a renowned expert on the measurement of economic inequality, but in “Inequality” he hides his math. “There are a number of graphs, and a small number of tables,” he writes, by way of apology, and he paraphrases Stephen Hawking: “Every equation halves the number of readers.”

Much of the book is a discussion of specific proposals. Atkinson believes that solutions like Putnam’s, which focus on inequality of opportunity, mainly through reforms having to do with public education, are inadequate. Atkinson thinks that the division between inequality of outcome and inequality of opportunity is largely false. He believes that tackling inequality of outcome is a very good way to tackle inequality of opportunity. (If you help a grownup get a job, her kids will have a better chance of climbing out of poverty, too.) Above all, he disagrees with the widespread assumption that technological progress and globalization are responsible for growing inequality. That assumption, he argues, is wrong and also dangerous, because it encourages the belief that growing inequality is inevitable.

Atkinson points out that neither globalization nor rapid technological advance is new and there are, therefore, lessons to be learned from history. Those lessons do not involve nostalgia. (Atkinson is actually an optimistic sort, and he spends time appreciating rising standards of living, worldwide.) One of those lessons is that globalizing economies aren’t like hurricanes or other acts of God or nature. Instead, they’re governed by laws regulating things like unions and trusts and banks and wages and taxes; laws are passed by legislators; in democracies, legislators are elected. So, too, new technologies don’t simply fall out of the sky, like meteors or little miracles. “The direction of technological change is the product of decisions by firms, researchers, and governments,” Atkinson writes. The iPhone exists, as Mariana Mazzucato demonstrated in her 2013 book “The Entrepreneurial State,” because various branches of the U.S. government provided research assistance that resulted in several key technological developments, including G.P.S., multi-touch screens, L.C.D. displays, lithium-ion batteries, and cellular networks.

Atkinson isn’t interested in stories the way Putnam is interested in stories. And he isn’t interested in villains the way Fraser is interested in villains. But he is interested in responsible parties, and in demanding government action. “It is not enough to say that rising inequality is due to technological forces outside our control,” Atkinson writes. “The government can influence the path taken.” In “Inequality: What Can Be Done?,” he offers fifteen proposals, from the familiar (unemployment programs, national savings bonds, and a more progressive tax structure) to the novel (a governmental role in the direction of technological development, a capital endowment or “minimum inheritance” paid to everyone on reaching adulthood), along with five “ideas to pursue,” which is where things get Piketty (a global tax on wealth, a minimum tax on corporations).

In Port Clinton, Ohio, a barbed-wire fence surrounds the abandoned Standard Products factory; the E.P.A. has posted signs warning that the site is hazardous. There’s no work there anymore, only poison. Robert Putnam finds that heartbreaking. Steve Fraser wishes people were angrier about it. Anthony Atkinson thinks something can be done. Atkinson’s specific policy recommendations are for the United Kingdom. In the United States, most of his proposals are nonstarters, no matter how many times you hear the word “inequality” on “Meet the Press” this year.

It might be that people have been studying inequality in all the wrong places. A few years ago, two scholars of comparative politics, Alfred Stepan, at Columbia, and the late Juan J. Linz—numbers men—tried to figure out why the United States has for so long had much greater income inequality than any other developed democracy. Because this disparity has been more or less constant, the question doesn’t lend itself very well to historical analysis. Nor is it easily subject to the distortions of nostalgia. But it does lend itself very well to comparative analysis.

Stepan and Linz identified twenty-three long-standing democracies with advanced economies. Then they counted the number of veto players in each of those twenty-three governments. (A veto player is a person or body that can block a policy decision. Stepan and Linz explain, “For example, in the United States, the Senate and the House of Representatives are veto players because without their consent, no bill can become a law.”) More than half of the twenty-three countries Stepan and Linz studied have only one veto player; most of these countries have unicameral parliaments. A few countries have two veto players; Switzerland and Australia have three. Only the United States has four. Then they made a chart, comparing Gini indices with veto-player numbers: the more veto players in a government, the greater the nation’s economic inequality. This is only a correlation, of course, and cross-country economic comparisons are fraught, but it’s interesting.

Then they observed something more. Their twenty-three democracies included eight federal governments with both upper and lower legislative bodies. Using the number of seats and the size of the population to calculate malapportionment, they assigned a “Gini Index of Inequality of Representation” to those eight upper houses, and found that the United States had the highest score: it has the most malapportioned and the least representative upper house. These scores, too, correlated with the countries’ Gini scores for income inequality: the less representative the upper body of a national legislature, the greater the gap between the rich and the poor.

The growth of inequality isn’t inevitable. But, insofar as Americans have been unable to adopt measures to reduce it, the numbers might seem to suggest that the problem doesn’t lie with how Americans treat one another’s kids, as lousy as that is. It lies with Congress. ♦

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By Paul Tough

By Ian Frazier

By John Cassidy

By Edwidge Danticat

• Democracy Papers

Political Inequality in Affluent Democracies

Over the next months, Items will publish essays based on research presented at a spring workshop on the theme “ Democratic Participation: A Broken Promise? ” cosponsored by the SSRC’s Anxieties of Democracy program’s Participation group and the German-based Democratic Anxieties . Here, Larry Bartels, cochair of the AOD Participation group, draws on recent work on the extent to which established democracies are disproportionately responsive to the preferences of their wealthiest citizens. While this is not news for observers of the United States, Bartels finds very similar patterns across what are often assumed to be the more egalitarian democracies of Europe.

One possible interpretation of these findings is that the American political system is anomalous in its apparent disregard for the preferences of middle-class and poor people. In that case, the severe political inequality documented there would presumably be accounted for by distinctive features of the United States, such as its system of private campaign finance, its weak labor unions, or its individualistic political culture. But, what if severe political inequality is endemic in affluent democracies? That would suggest that fiddling with the political institutions of the United States to make them more like Denmark’s (or vice versa) would be unlikely to bring us significantly closer to satisfying Dahl’s standard of democratic equality. We would be forced to conclude either that Dahl’s standard is fundamentally misguided or that none of the political systems commonly identified as democratic comes anywhere close to meriting that designation.

Analyzing policy responsiveness

My analyses employ data on citizens’ views about social spending and the welfare state from three major cross-national survey projects—the International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), the World Values Survey (WVS), and the European Values Survey (EVS). In combination, these three sources provide relevant opinion data from 160 surveys conducted between 1985 and 2012 in 30 countries, including most of the established democracies of Western Europe and the English-speaking world and some newer democracies in Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Asia. I examine shifts in (real per capita) social spending in the two years following each survey. Does greater public enthusiasm for the welfare state lead to increases in social spending, other things being equal? And, more importantly here, do the views of low-income people have the same apparent influence on policy as the views of affluent people?

The first four rows of the accompanying table present key results from four versions of my empirical analysis—(1) using the WVS and EVS data only; (2) including also the data from ISSP (with due allowance for differences in instrumentation between these sources); (3) excluding two outliers (in which very large increases in social spending were associated with changes in the political systems of Poland and South Korea in the 1990s); and (4) weighting the data from each country-year by population (to ensure that the results hold among large as well as small countries).

Remarkably, in every instance the results suggest that the views of poor people have no impact on social spending. Indeed, the estimates of low-income responsiveness are negative in every case, and sufficiently precise to confidently reject the hypothesis that poor people have even half as much political influence as affluent people. 9 For the hypothesis that the poorest citizens in each country-year had half as much political influence as the most affluent citizens, the relevant t -statistics range from 3.7 to 5.9. The t -statistics for the null hypothesis of equal influence range from 5.6 to 8.1. If these results are not wildly misleading, they dramatically corroborate the pessimistic findings regarding disparities in responsiveness in the United States.

Disparities in responsiveness are ubiquitous in affluent democracies

The remaining rows of the table report the corresponding estimates of low-income responsiveness from a variety of additional analyses focusing on varying subsets of country-years differentiated on the basis of geography, political culture, political institutions, or economic circumstances: (5) established democracies (excluding ten country-years in which democratic systems were less than a decade old); (6) “social democracies” of continental Europe and Scandinavia versus (7) “liberal democracies” of the English-speaking world and Asia; (8) all European democracies, including the formerly communist countries of Eastern Europe and a few liberal democracies (Great Britain, Ireland, and Switzerland) along with the social democracies of continental Europe; (9) federal systems versus (10) those with centralized national policy-making systems; (11) countries with proportional representation versus (12) those with majoritarian electoral systems; (13) the wealthiest country-years (with GDP per capita in excess of $30,000) versus (14) less wealthy country years; and (15) the most economically unequal country-years (with post-transfer Gini indices in excess of 30) versus (16) less economically unequal country-years.

These differentiated analyses of policy responsiveness capture just a few of the many dimensions of political, cultural, institutional, and economic variation that might plausibly affect the relationship between citizens and their governments with respect to social spending. Moreover, the statistical imprecision of many of the results summarized in the table underlines the limitations of the data employed here for analyzing patterns of responsiveness in distinct subsets of my sample of affluent democracies. Nonetheless, the striking pattern of biased responsiveness seems to hold with remarkable consistency across affluent democracies. It is clearly not attributable to any single country or cluster of countries, or to (at least) the specific institutional arrangements that have figured most prominently in the scholarly literature on comparative representation. Indeed, none of the subsets of country-years considered here provides any evidence of positive responsiveness of governments to the preferences of low-income citizens. Every single estimate of the “low-income responsiveness ratio” is negative, and sufficiently precise to confidently reject the hypothesis that governments are even half as responsiveness to the preferences of poor people as they are to the preferences of affluent people. 11 The hypothesis that poor people’s preferences are half as influential as those of affluent people can be rejected in every instance, with t -statistics ranging from 2.0 to 6.3. Thus, while much more careful comparisons remain to be done, it seems hard to avoid the provisional conclusion that, in this policy domain, affluent democracies are more similar than different in their disparate responsiveness to the preferences of their citizens.

Political inequality and democratic politics

Obviously, my analysis has greatly simplified the complexity of social welfare policymaking in thirty different countries over a period of three decades. Statistical analyses based on such a small and heterogeneous sample of policymaking experience must be suggestive rather than definitive. The apparent evidence of hyper-inequality presented here may turn out to be an artifact of peculiar patterns of measurement error 12 See →Christopher Achen, “Proxy Variables and Incorrect Signs on Regression Coefficients,” Political Methodology 11 (1985): 299–316. →Gilens, Affluence and Influence , 253–258. or other problems of data or model specification. In the meantime, however, my findings suggest that severe disparities in responsiveness are rampant in contemporary affluent democracies, regardless of the significant differences in their political cultures, institutions, and economies.

Table 1. The ubiquity of extreme political inequality

Estimates of the relative impact of low-income preferences on changes in social spending in 30 OECD democracies, 1985–2014. Non-linear regression parameter estimates with standard errors (clustered by country) in parentheses.

This piece summarizes research reported in my working paper on “Political Inequality in Affluent Democracies: The Social Welfare Deficit” (Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions #5-2017: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/csdi/research/papers.php ), presented at the Workshop on Political Inequality and Democratic Innovations (Democratic Participation—A Broken Promise?), Villa Vigoni, March 14–17, 2017.

References:

Larry M. Bartels

Larry M. Bartels holds the May Werthan Shayne Chair of Public Policy and Social Science at Vanderbilt University. His scholarship and teaching focus on public opinion, electoral politics, public policy, and political representation. His books include Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age (2nd ed., Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton University Press, 2016) and Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (with Christopher Achen, Princeton University Press, 2016). He is also the author of numerous scholarly articles and of occasional pieces in the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and other outlets.... Read more

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C.S. Lewis on Equality and Our Core Misconception About Democracy

By maria popova.

“The notion of obligations comes before that of rights, which is subordinate and relative to the former,” wrote the great French philosopher Simone Weil shortly before her untimely and patriotic death as she contemplated the crucial difference between our rights and our obligations . “A right is not effectual by itself, but only in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds.” Nowhere do we muddle these two notions more liberally than in our treatment of democracy and its foundational principle of equality — a basic right to be conferred upon every human being, but also something the upkeep of which demands our active participation and contribution.

That’s what C.S. Lewis (November 29, 1898–November 22, 1963) examines in a superb 1943 essay titled “Equality,” originally published in The Spectator three days after Weil’s death and later included in Present Concerns ( public library ) — a posthumous anthology of Lewis’s timeless and timely journalistic essays.

A generation before Leonard Cohen contemplated democracy’s foibles and redemptions , Lewis writes at the peak of WWII as history’s deadliest and most unredeemable failure of democracy is sweeping Europe:

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. And whenever their weakness is exposed, the people who prefer tyranny make capital out of the exposure… The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Parker Palmer’s notion of democracy as the “politics of the brokenhearted,” Lewis expands upon his counterintuitive case for equality:

I do not think that equality is one of those things (like wisdom or happiness) which are good simply in themselves and for their own sakes. I think it is in the same class as medicine, which is good because we are ill, or clothes which are good because we are no longer innocent… Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.

In a passage of chilling poignancy and timeliness today, as we witness tyrants rise to power by playing to people’s craving for supremacy as a hedge against insecurity and fear, Lewis writes:

There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. That is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values: offers food to some need which we have starved.

Just as true generosity lies in mastering the osmosis of giving and receiving , true equality, Lewis argues, requires the parallel desires to be honored and to honor. He writes:

When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but as an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other, the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow, is a prosaic barbarian. […] Every intrusion of the spirit that says “I’m as good as you” into our personal and spiritual life is to be resisted just as jealously as every intrusion of bureaucracy or privilege into our politics. Hierarchy within can alone preserve egalitarianism without. Romantic attacks on democracy will come again. We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they.

Complement Present Concerns with Lewis on why we read , the essence of friendship , what it really means to have free will in a universe of fixed laws, his ideal daily routine , and the key to authenticity in writing , then revisit Walt Whitman on how literature bolsters democracy .

— Published November 29, 2016 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/11/29/c-s-lewis-equality-democracy/ —

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Inequalities and Democracy

Research profile

The workgroup explores contemporary politics of inequality in Europe and beyond. We examine political and policy formations that address and shape inequality mechanisms and social hierarchies based on gender, class, ethnicity, race, ability, and human mobility and their intersections . Research in the workgroup pursues case based as well as comparative inquiries that connect these wider equality, social justice, and social policy agendas with outstanding democracy, de- and re-democratization puzzles. Research addresses among others:

• old and new agendas in human rights based emancipatory struggles in times of crisis and crisis management;
• the challenges and potentials of civil society participation in facilitating more inclusive democratic politics;
• the (re)production of inequalities and social exclusion in authoritarian and de-democratizing regimes;
• the emergence of new forms of social solidarity in urban, domestic, and transnational contexts in times of democratic crisis.

A wide range of methodological approaches are applied and combined including qualitative, interpretive, ethnographic, participatory, as well as quantitative, bigdata based and mixed methods.

The workgroup researchers possess contextual knowledge and have access to relevant scholarly networks in Latin America, the Middle East, Turkey, and India in addition to our deep familiarity with different parts of Europe, Central and South-East Europe, and select post-Soviet states and societies.

Research agendas for 2023/24

During academic year 2023/24, the workgroup will devote specific attention to linkages between the politics of socio-economic and distributive inequalities , their intersections with other social inequality grounds , and the contestation of democracy. This will include:

• strategic profiling of the already accumulated knowledge on social inequalities enacted through gender, ethnic, racial, ability and human mobility based social hierarchies and political mechanisms. To this end, we are organizing academic discussions and events to unpack the nexus of socio-economic inequalities and political polarization, spatial processes of distributive struggles and exclusions intersecting with gender, ethnic, racial, ability and mobility based hierarchies;
• scholarly exchanges with other workgroups of the Democracy Institute. Cooperation is explored with the De(re)democratization WG in connection to the two new Horizon Europe funded democracy research projects ( AUTHLIB , CCINDLE ). Cooperation is ongoing with the History WG in regard to history of ideas on social justice and inclusive politics, avenues of democratization through participation, legal struggles for empowerment and disempowerment of selected social groups, among other topics.

Inequalities Seminar, list of past events

P ublications by research group members : 2022-23 / 2021-22 / 2020-21

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6 facts about economic inequality in the U.S.

Rising economic inequality in the United States has become a central issue in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, and discussions about policy interventions that might help address it are likely to remain at the forefront in the 2020 general election .

As these debates continue, here are some basic facts about how economic inequality has changed over time and how the U.S. compares globally.

How we did this

For this analysis, we gathered data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the World Bank . We also used previously published data points from Pew Research Center surveys and analyses of outside data.

Over the past 50 years, the highest-earning 20% of U.S. households have steadily brought in a larger share of the country’s total income. In 2018, households in the top fifth of earners (with incomes of $130,001 or more that year) brought in 52% of all U.S. income, more than the lower four-fifths combined, according to Census Bureau data.

In 1968, by comparison, the top-earning 20% of households brought in 43% of the nation’s income, while those in the lower four income quintiles accounted for 56%.

Among the top 5% of households – those with incomes of at least $248,729 in 2018 – their share of all U.S. income rose from 16% in 1968 to 23% in 2018.

Income inequality in the U.S. is the highest of all the G7 nations , according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development . To compare income inequality across countries, the OECD uses the Gini coefficient , a commonly used measure ranging from 0, or perfect equality, to 1, or complete inequality. In 2017, the U.S. had a Gini coefficient of 0.434. In the other G7 nations, the Gini ranged from 0.326 in France to 0.392 in the UK.

Globally, the Gini ranges from lows of about 0.25 in some Eastern European countries to highs of 0.5 to 0.6 in countries in southern Africa, according to World Bank estimates .

The black-white income gap in the U.S. has persisted over time. The difference in median household incomes between white and black Americans has grown from about $23,800 in 1970 to roughly $33,000 in 2018 (as measured in 2018 dollars). Median black household income was 61% of median white household income in 2018, up modestly from 56% in 1970 – but down slightly from 63% in 2007, before the Great Recession , according to Current Population Survey data.

Overall, 61% of Americans say there is too much economic inequality in the country today, but views differ by political party and household income level. Among Republicans and those who lean toward the GOP, 41% say there is too much inequality in the U.S., compared with 78% of Democrats and Democratic leaners, a Pew Research Center survey conducted in September 2019 found.

Across income groups, U.S. adults are about equally likely to say there is too much economic inequality. But upper- (27%) and middle-income Americans (26%) are more likely than those with lower incomes (17%) to say that there is about the right amount of economic inequality.

These views also vary by income within the two party coalitions. Lower-income Republicans are more likely than upper-income ones to say there’s too much inequality in the country today (48% vs. 34%). Among Democrats, the reverse is true: 93% at upper-income levels say there is too much inequality, compared with 65% of lower-income Democrats.

The wealth gap between America’s richest and poorer families more than doubled from 1989 to 2016, according to a recent analysis by the Center. Another way of measuring inequality is to look at household wealth, also known as net worth, or the value of assets owned by a family, such as a home or a savings account, minus outstanding debt, such as a mortgage or student loan.

In 1989, the richest 5% of families had 114 times as much wealth as families in the second quintile (one tier above the lowest), at the median $2.3 million compared with $20,300. By 2016, the top 5% held 248 times as much wealth at the median. (The median wealth of the poorest 20% is either zero or negative in most years we examined.)

The richest families are also the only ones whose wealth increased in the years after the start of the Great Recession. From 2007 to 2016, the median net worth of the top 20% increased 13%, to $1.2 million. For the top 5%, it increased by 4%, to $4.8 million. In contrast, the median net worth of families in lower tiers of wealth decreased by at least 20%. Families in the second-lowest fifth experienced a 39% loss (from $32,100 in 2007 to $19,500 in 2016).

Middle-class incomes have grown at a slower rate than upper-tier incomes over the past five decades, the same analysis found . From 1970 to 2018, the median middle-class income increased from $58,100 to $86,600, a gain of 49%. By comparison, the median income for upper-tier households grew 64% over that time, from $126,100 to $207,400.

The share of American adults who live in middle-income households has decreased from 61% in 1971 to 51% in 2019. During this time, the share of adults in the upper-income tier increased from 14% to 20%, and the share in the lower-income tier increased from 25% to 29%.

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Katherine Schaeffer is a research analyst at Pew Research Center .

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Inequality and American Democracy Essay

Introduction, equal rights, inequality in contributions on national matters, government responses, works cited.

The Americans are globally famous for their relentless support for democratic governance. Jacobs et al asserts that the ideals of democratically responsive governance are highly cherished by the American people (3). Ironically, the situation is markedly different within the American government even as they actively support democracy in other countries. With the growing inequality issues in the country, the ideals of democratic governance have been highly compromised.

The major disparities existing are mostly noticeable within the public domain (Jacobs et al. 3). Primarily, the issue is about income differences, opportunities for wealth creation and equal citizenship (Jacobs et al. 3). These gaps are growing rapidly in the United States compared to any other country in the world. Yet the US still considers herself the world’s greatest advocates of democracy. The American government is making little or no progress in the efforts to realize the democratic ideals set forth by the founding fathers of the nation.

The American society is the most culturally diverse in the world and this comes with a number of challenges as well. There were steps made to achieve equality in the 1950s and 1960s at the height of racism. Racial segregation and exclusion became illegal and socially unacceptable hence moving a step towards equality (Jacobs et al. 4). This allowed the white and black community to access education in the same schools and get access to health services in the same health facilities.

This was a good gesture towards democratic governance. It is also worth noting that major gender based barriers started to break down during the same time and women were empowered to pursue academic, political, and economic opportunities just as men did (Jacobs et al. 4). Other marginalized groups like the Latin Americans also got access to equal rights on an equal footing with the rest of the Americans.

Notably, the previous barriers that promoted inequalities such as race, gender, ethnicity to mention but a few do not exist today. Nonetheless, new barriers that are fostering inequality in the American society have emerged and they are rapidly spreading within the government and the country at large posing a threat to the realization of democracy.

The greatest of these barriers is the gaps in income and wealth between the Americans (Jacobs et al. 4). The gap between the rich and the poor is greatly increasing owing to disparities in income especially in the private and the civil sectors. This gap is increasingly creating a major segregation in the job market as well as in schools and colleges.

Apparently, the rich and the wealthy are better positioned to cease opportunities that are out of reach for the middle and lower income classes. Consequently, the rich are in a position to get richer while limiting access to resources by the poor man. That is why the saying that the rich will continue to get rich while the poor man becomes poorer is very true.

Some element of racist treatments is also present in school among students. In America today, one has to work very hard in order to maintain his or her current economic position (Jacobs et al. 5). One would expect that through hard work, there would be an upward mobility in the economic ladder but that is not normally the case in the US.

Voicing the needs of the American people has never been easy and only a selected few can do this. The opportunity to exercise one’s right in the US does not come easily as there are factors that influence the ear of the government. These factors include a high income, occupational or career success, and high levels of academic achievements (Jacobs et al. 4).

Members who fit in these criteria are more likely to participate in political, social, and economic decision-making process than the ordinary citizen is. Government officials are more likely to listen to the needs of such elite citizens and deliver on their demands more promptly. Unfortunately, this is the bitter truth and the reality of the American government amidst its call for democratic governance around the world.

Voting turnout has also declined since the beginning of the 21 st century when the income gap began to grow rapidly. Statistics show that the majority who vote are also the elite while the low-income earners decline to exercise their democratic right to cast their votes. How does the decline of voter turnout relate to inequality? A number of decisive factors discourage or make the voting process a struggle for the electorate.

The economic inequality is a major factor that discourages the less economically privileged eligible voters from voting. There are also some laws in some states that forbid the minority from voting and a good example is the law forbidding prisoners and former prisoners from voting (Verba, Lehman, and Brady 1). In addition, the current methods of campaigns are keen on raising funds and persuading the already existing voters to vote. A more different approach is necessary to woo the non-voting yet eligible voters to get out and exercise their rights.

Through campaign contributions, the rich and wealthy folks have a leeway to express and voice their demands as the platform gives them an advantage over the poor folks. Today, one can only gain justice and political influence through money and affluence thus leaving the poor man out of the standard bar. The least contributors in the national campaigns are the poor ordinary citizens while the few political donors are in charge in the political arena due to their financial influence.

In order to exercise the rights of citizenship, one requires resources and skills. These requirements are only accessible to the wealthy hence the inequality. People with higher education and great careers such as doctors and lawyers among other professional have more confidence to speak compared to an ordinary citizen working as subordinate staff. Naturally, the nature of American politics gives no voice to the poor while the rich and affluent get enough attention at the expense of the poor man.

Jacobs et al argues that three quarters of the well-off citizens are in one way or another associated with an organization that has great influence on the political arena (10). They also noted in their research that half of the wealthiest people in America are in contact with public officials. This gives the rich double access to public resources compared to the middle and low-income earners in the US (Freeman).

Government officials are highly influenced by the privileged citizens. The response of the government today in America no longer represents the will of the majority. A selected few wealthy men and women determine the future of the vast majority which is not a principle of democracy. Money has become the essential for government attention.

Ironically, the already wealthy and advantaged citizens who are able to take care of themselves are the most catered for by the government. Democratic rule should ensure equality and fairness with the majority influencing the political stands. Nonetheless, in America, it is a reversed role since the minorities hold the realms of power while the majorities ride under the mercies of the few wealthy citizens.

Through money, the wealthy establish relationships with government officials creating a connection that enables them to access national resources that are out of the ordinary peoples reach. This gives them a further advantage despite the fact that they already have an advantage over the poor with their wealth and money. This disparity is among the issues that are widening the gap between the rich and the poor. The gap grows wider because the more one earns, the more they gain access to resources and consequently the further the resources get away from the poor man’s reach. The effect is cyclic in that one direction influences the other.

The affluent also influence government policies as well and normally, policies will always consider the needs and demands of the wealthy business communities and organized groups (Frankenberg, Orfield, and Lee). The government is always bias when responding to national issues normally bending to the side that favors the rich (Skrentny). The government is moving towards a more tragic direction by allowing a few affluent individuals to take the country hostage.

The lack of spread opportunities and the gap between the rich and the poor is a disastrous condition in any economy. What this does is that the ordinary citizen will get discouraged and be reluctant to participate in national activities. This may include voting and working, which contributes to the national financial muscles, to mention but a few.

In the United States of America, democracy is only known theoretically and not as a practical state of affair. This paper has established the facts about government inequality and bias treatment of its citizens. The striking income disparity in the country is not a good example of a democratic nation since it is in contradiction with the idea of democracy. In the above research, it is clear that democracy is not as easy to achieve as it sounds and the quality of political leaders as well as the political will to pursue democratic governance highly counts.

The financial gap between the American citizens is creating a division not only affecting social interaction but also economic and political well-being. The voter turnout for instance has been on the decline since the beginning of the 21 st century just when the gap begun to build up. This clearly means that income disparities greatly influence the political structure of a country.

Democracy is a good leadership model that allows for equal social, economic, and political opportunities for all citizens without favoritism. The government under democratic principles must always work towards engaging the majority rule and open access of power and influence to the majority as opposed to a select few. That is the real essence of democratic governance.

Frankenberg, Erica, Chumgmei Lee, and Gary Orfield. A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream? Cambridge, MA: Harvard Civil Rights Project, 2002. Print.

Freeman, Richard. Working under Different Rules. A National Bureau of Economic Research Project Report, New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 1994. Print.

Jacobs, Lawrence, and Robert Shapiro. Politicians Don’t Pander Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Print.

Jacobs, Lawrence et al. American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality. Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy American Political Science Association. 5 Sep. 2012. Web.

Skrentny, John. The Minority Rights Revolution, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Print.

Verba, Sidney, Kay Lehman, and Henry Brady. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2019, November 24). Inequality and American Democracy. https://ivypanda.com/essays/inequality-and-american-democracy/

"Inequality and American Democracy." IvyPanda , 24 Nov. 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/inequality-and-american-democracy/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'Inequality and American Democracy'. 24 November.

IvyPanda . 2019. "Inequality and American Democracy." November 24, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/inequality-and-american-democracy/.

1. IvyPanda . "Inequality and American Democracy." November 24, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/inequality-and-american-democracy/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Inequality and American Democracy." November 24, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/inequality-and-american-democracy/.

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As India goes to the polls, can democracy deliver a better life for all of its people?

Behind a veneer of progress, injustice and inequality propped up by corruption and the caste system haunt the subcontinent

T his year, more than 80 countries and half the world’s population face elections . While many islands in the Caribbean go to the polls, their people are usually more occupied with US and British elections than those in their ancestral homes in Africa and India.

This may be excusable, there is an old saying: “When America sneezes, the Caribbean catches a cold.” It may also seem strange that some identify as Republican or Democrat, and Conservative or Labour, while living in a region that has to endure a rigorous process and heavy expense to obtain a visa to even holiday in those countries.

A history of slavery, indentureship and colonialism links the Caribbean to the UK and the US, but the region is also indelibly linked to Africa and India .

This month, India continues its democratic experiment. General elections to vote in 543 members of the 18thLok Sabha, the lower house of parliament, will run from now until 1 June. India’s elections are “colossal, colourful, and complex, involving an estimated 969 million eligible voters”, according to Al Jazeera . The largest-ever election in the world, it will be held in seven phases, with results announced on 4 June.

The incumbent prime minister, Narendra Modi , is contesting for a third term, making the fabric of the world’s largest democracy appear contradictory. The 2019 election saw a voter turnout of 67%, reflecting the electorate’s engagement with the democratic process. However, regionalism and identity politics continue to influence electoral outcomes, with coalition politics shaping the dynamics of governance.

India navigates a complex political milieu, its economic prowess and technological advancements have garnered global attention. From space exploration to nuclear power, India to most onlookers, radiates a sense of promise.

Its nuclear capabilities are a cornerstone of its strategic posture and is seen as a deterrent in a volatile geopolitical environment. India’s strides in space, successfully launching the Chandrayaan-3 lunar mission last year, underscore its capabilities in scientific and engineering excellence.

The country’s economic trajectory showcases a remarkable transformation, propelled by dynamic entrepreneurial ecosystem and burgeoning technological innovation. India is home to 200 billionaires , up from 169 last year, with a collective wealth of $954bn (£766bn), according to Forbes. This surge in wealth highlights India as an economic powerhouse, attracting investment from around the world.

However, this is a country with lived experience of the long-term ills and remnants of colonialism. Beneath the veneer of progress and economic strides lie deeply entrenched inequalities, and astonishingly persistent and widespread poverty.

It is also marred by an anachronistic caste system , gender disparities and violence against women . Corruption has also long been a significant impediment to India’s economic, political and social wellbeing.

But how should a country’s overall progress be assessed? Should it only be based on its nuclear power, space exploration achievements or how many new billionaires are being produced?

It seems to be a global south problem that leaders are more enthusiastic to spend taxpayers’ funds on expensive vanity projects than concern themselves with fixing basic issues of infrastructure, health and education to raise the standard of living for all its people.

While nations spend billions on space and nuclear programmes, and financing wars, such as in Ukraine and Gaza, people living in poverty are ultimately forgotten. Today, 38 million people in the US , 14 million in the UK , 95 million in the European Union and about 13 million in the Caribbean are living below or near the poverty line.

In India, it is much more, but the exact level is contested, based on the measures used. According to the World Bank, 12.9% of India’s population, or 269.8 million people, lived below the national poverty line of $2.15 a day as of 2021. Per capita income is $2,848, ranking it 143rd out of 195 countries , lower than Indonesia.

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The UN Development Programme’s 2022 Multidimensional Poverty report evaluates the poverty rate as being 16.4%. However, this does not correspond to the true economic reality of India, as being a lower-middle-income country, the appropriate poverty line should be at $3.65 a day, according to purchasing power parity. At that rate, real poverty is closer to 47% or 673 million people .

This statement by the World Bank in 2022 is concerning: “We rely on countries’ own judgments of what it means to be poor.” Therefore, deciding what poverty is becomes subjective and open to manipulation by politicians wishing to be seen as creating improvements.

India’s glaring wealth disparity highlights the urgent need for social reforms. In 1945 Indian social reformer Dr Bhimrao R Ambedkar said : “In every country, there is a governing class. No country is free from it. But is there anywhere in the world a governing class with such selfish, diseased and dangerous and perverse mentality, with such a hideous and infamous philosophy of life which advocates the trampling down of the servile classes to sustain the power and glory of the governing class? I know of none.”

Ambedkar made this statement during a period of intense social and political upheaval, when the struggle against British rule was reaching its peak. He was addressing the power structures, systemic inequalities and injustices perpetuated by the caste system and the complicity of the ruling class in sustaining it.

His critique was aimed at the upper-caste Hindu elite, which held power and influence in spheres of society including politics, bureaucracy and academia. He believed their adherence to caste discrimination hindered progress and development. Not much has changed today – India’s caste system is still the foundation of this disparity.

The pressing challenges of poverty alleviation and social development persist as millions of Indians remain trapped in a cycle of poverty, with limited access to education, healthcare and employment opportunities.

Additionally, the pervasiveness of corruption has a profound impact on India’s economic development, with studies estimating that corruption costs the economy billions of dollars annually. Last year’s World Economic Forum global competitiveness report identified corruption as one of the most problematic factors for doing business in India, hindering investment, stifling innovation and distorting market dynamics.

Corruption exacerbates income inequality, disproportionately affecting marginalised communities and perpetuating poverty. It further undermines the delivery of essential services, depriving millions of citizens of basic rights.

This systemic corruption not only erodes public trust in institutions but also widens the gap between the privileged few and the marginalised many.

Addressing corruption requires concerted efforts to strengthen accountability and integrity in governance and society. Initiatives such as the Lokpal Act, 2013 , aimed at combatting government corruption, are important steps.

However, implementation and enforcement mechanisms are essential to translate legislation into outcomes. Fostering a culture of ethical leadership and civic engagement is critical to building resilient institutions and promoting sustainable development in India.

As India stands on the threshold, progress is fraught with challenges and opportunities, while the data paints a picture of many paradoxes. Political participation and economic growth showcase India’s potential, but persistent poverty and inequalities underscore challenges ahead. Gigantic concerted efforts are needed to address disparities, promote inclusive development and uphold the principles of democracy and social justice.

India’s sociopolitical and economic character mirrors many Caribbean countries such as Trinidad and Guyana. However, the spotlight on India extends far beyond its regional counterparts, beckoning attention from its diaspora.

A global audience eagerly awaits the emergence of a leader capable of steering the nation towards a future characterised by inspirational governance, unwavering commitment to reform and the transformative upliftment of all segments of society.

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Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize

Tressie mcmillan cottom.

2023 Recipient

Celebrated cultural critic, sociologist, and author Tressie McMillan Cottom is the 2023 winner of the Joseph B. and Toby Gittler Prize by Brandeis University.

Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom's first book, "Lower Ed," captures the zeitgeist on how profit, and debt, moved from the margins of higher education to bankrupt the very heart of American meritocracy. Influential change-makers like Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and activists like The Debt Strike Collective cites her book as important for changing the conversation about higher education. Her sharp insights do not let anyone off the hook — she argues that bad federal policy, state disinvestment, amoral narratives about meritocracy, and prestige-driven cultures of traditional higher education all share responsibility for Lower Ed.

Tressie McMillan Cottom is a professor with the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life at UNC-Chapel Hill, a New York Times columnist, and 2020 MacArthur Fellow.

McMillan Cottom's far-ranging intellectual interests include books, articles, magazine profiles and opinion-editorials but it is her essays that routinely shape the discourse. Her version of the essay — or Tressays, as her devout fans refer to them — is part revolutionary pamphlet, part poetic chapbook, part sociological analysis, and part call-to-arms. Her 2019 collection of essays, "Thick," was a National Book Award finalist that re-imagines the modern essay form. Tressays are powerful storytelling that make problems for power. Careful and poetic, McMillan Cottom explores the everyday culture of big ideas like racism, sexism, inequality and oppression by giving us the language to live better lives.

Tressie McMillan Cottom was in residence at Brandeis from Oct. 25–27, 2023. Her residency included an award ceremony and public lecture on Oct. 26.

"Public Knowledge in Critical Times," Oct. 25, 2023

Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom in conversation with Professor Sarah Mayorga, Associate Professor of Sociology, Oct. 26, 2023

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• Tressie McMillan Cottom selected as winner of 2023 Gittler Prize

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Guest Essay

Why Losing Political Power Now Feels Like ‘Losing Your Country’

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

Is partisan hostility so deeply enmeshed in American politics that it cannot be rooted out?

Will Donald Trump institutionalize democratic backsliding — the rejection of adverse election results, the demonization of minorities and the use of the federal government to punish opponents — as a fixture of American politics?

The literature of polarization suggests that partisan antipathy has become deeply entrenched and increasingly resistant to amelioration.

“Human brains are constantly scanning for threats to in-groups,” Rachel Kleinfeld , a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in a September 2023 essay, “ Polarization, Democracy, and Political Violence in the United States: What the Research Says .”

“As people affectively polarize, they appear to blow out-group threats out of proportion, exaggerating the out-group’s dislike and disgust for their own group, and getting ready to defend their in-group, sometimes aggressively,” Kleinfeld argued.

Kleinfeld acknowledged that “a number of interventions have been shown in lab settings, games and short experiments to reduce affective intervention in the short term,” but, she was quick to caution, “reducing affective polarization through these lab experiments and games has not been shown to affect regular Americans’ support for antidemocratic candidates, support for antidemocratic behaviors, voting behavior or support for political violence.”

Taking her argument a step further, Kleinfeld wrote:

Interventions to reduce affective polarization will be ineffective if they operate only at the individual, emotional level. Ignoring the role of polarizing politicians and political incentives to instrumentalize affective polarization for political gain will fail to generate change while enhancing cynicism when polite conversations among willing participants do not generate prodemocratic change.

Yphtach Lelkes , a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, succinctly described by email the hurdles facing proposed remedies for polarization and antidemocratic trends:

I don’t think any bottom-up intervention is going to solve a problem that is structural. You could reduce misperceptions for a day or two or put diverse groups together for an hour, but these people will be polarized again as soon as they are exposed once more to campaign rhetoric.

The reality, Lelkes continued, is that “a fish rots from the head, and political elites are driving any democratic backsliding that is occurring in America. Most Republican voters do not support the antidemocratic policies and practices of their elected officials.”

In their March 2024 paper, “ Uncommon and Nonpartisan: Antidemocratic Attitudes in the American Public ,” Lelkes, Derek E. Holliday and Shanto Iyengar , both of Stanford, and Sean J. Westwood of Dartmouth found that public opposition to antidemocratic policies is not adequate to prevent their adoption:

More ominous implications of our results are that 1) public support is not a necessary precondition for backsliding behavior by elites, and 2) Americans, despite their distaste for norm violations, continue to elect representatives whose policies and actions threaten democracy. One explanation is that when partisanship is strong, voters place party and policy goals over democratic values. Indeed, one of the least-supported norm violations — removing polling places in outparty-dominated areas — has already been violated by elected officials in Texas, and there are concerns about pending similar laws in other states. Such unconstrained elite behavior suggests that threats to democracy could well manifest themselves in both parties in the future.

The level of public support for democratic institutions will be a crucial factor in the 2024 elections. President Biden is campaigning on the theme that Trump and his MAGA allies are intent on strengthening authoritarian leadership at the expense of democracy.

Political scientists and reform groups seeking to restore collegiality to political debate and elections have experimented with a wide variety of techniques to reduce partisan hostility and support for antidemocratic policies.

These efforts have raised doubts among other election experts, both about their effectiveness and durability. Such experts cite the virulence of the conflicts over race, ethnicity and values and the determination of Trump and other politicians to keep divisive issues in the forefront of campaigns.

I have written before about the largest study of techniques to lessen polarization, which was conducted by Jan G. Voelkel and Robb Willer , sociologists at Stanford, along with many other colleagues. Voelkel and Willer are the primary authors of “ Megastudy Identifying Effective Interventions to Strengthen Americans’ Democratic Attitudes .” Given the heightened importance of the coming election and the potential effects of polarization on it, their study is worth re-evaluating.

Voelkel, Willer and 83 others

conducted a megastudy (n=32,059) testing 25 interventions designed by academics and practitioners to reduce Americans’ partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes. We find nearly every intervention reduced partisan animosity, most strongly by highlighting sympathetic and relatable individuals with different political beliefs. We also identify several interventions that reduced support for undemocratic practices and partisan violence, most strongly by correcting misperceptions of outpartisans’ views — showing that antidemocratic attitudes, although difficult to move, are not intractable.

Their own data and their responses to my inquiries suggest, however, that the optimism of their paper needs to be tempered.

In the case of the “six interventions that significantly reduced partisan animosity,” the authors reported that two weeks later “the average effect size in the durability survey amounted to 29 percent of the average effect size in the main survey.”

I asked Voelkel to explain this further, posing the question: “If the initial reduction in the level of partisan animosity was 10 percentage points, does the 29 percent figure indicate that after two weeks the reduction in partisan animosity was 2.9 percentage points?” Voelkel wrote back to say yes.

In an email responding to some of my follow-up questions about the paper, Voelkel wrote:

I do not want to overstate the success of the interventions that we tested in our study. Our contribution is that we identify psychological strategies for intervening on partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes in the context of a survey experiment. We still need to test how big the effects could be in a large-scale campaign in which the psychological mechanisms for reducing partisan animosity and antidemocratic attitudes get triggered not once (as in our study) but ideally many times and over a longer period.

Voelkel cautioned that “one-time interventions might not be enough to sustainably reduce affective polarization in the mass public. Thus, successful efforts would need to be applied widely and repeatedly to trigger the psychological mechanisms that are associated with reductions in affective polarization.”

Willer sent a detailed response to my queries by email:

First, to be clear, we do not claim that the interventions we tested have large enough effects that they would cure the problems they target. We do not find evidence for that. Far from it. I would characterize the results of the Strengthening Democracy Challenge in a more measured way. We find that many of the interventions we tested reliably, meaningfully and durably reduce both survey and behavioral indicators of partisan animosity.

Willer wrote that “the interventions we tested were pretty effective in reducing animosity toward rival partisans, particularly in the short term. However, we found that the interventions we tested were substantially less effective in reducing antidemocratic attitudes, like support for undemocratic practices and candidates.”

Other scholars were more skeptical.

I asked Lilliana Mason , a political scientist at Johns Hopkins and a leading scholar of affective polarization: “Are there methods to directly lessen polarization? Are they possible on a large, populationwide scale?”

“If we knew that,” she replied by email, “we would have definitely told people already.”

There is evidence, Mason continued, that

it is possible to correct misperceptions about politics by simply providing correct information. The problem is that this new correct information doesn’t change people’s feelings about political candidates or issues. For example, you can correct a lie told by Donald Trump, and people will believe the new correct information, but that won’t change their feelings about Trump at all.

“We think of affective polarization as being extremely loyal to one side and feeling strong animosity toward the other side,” Mason wrote, adding:

This can be rooted in substantive disagreements on policy, identity-based status threat, safe versus dangerous worldview, historical and contemporary patterns of oppression, violations of political norms, vilifying rhetoric, propagandistic media and/or a number of other influences. But once we are polarized, it’s very difficult to use reason and logic to convince us to think otherwise.

Similarly, “there are methods that reduce polarization in academic research settings,” Westwood, an author of the March paper cited above, wrote by email. He continued:

The fundamental problems are that none “cure” polarization (i.e., move the population from negative to neutral attitudes toward the opposing party), none last more than a short period of time and none have a plausible path to societywide deployment. It is impossible to reach every American in need of treatment, and many would balk at the idea of having their political attitudes manipulated by social scientists or community groups.

More important, in Westwood’s view, is that

whatever techniques might exist to reduce citizen animosity must be accompanied by efforts to reduce hostility among elected officials. It doesn’t matter if we can make someone more positive toward the other party if that effect is quickly undone by watching cable news, reading social media or otherwise listening to divisive political elites.

Referring to the Voelkel-Willer paper, Westwood wrote:

It is a critically important scientific study, but it, like nearly all social science research, does not demonstrate that the studied approaches work in the real world. Participants in this study were paid volunteers, and the effects were large but not curative. (They reduced partisan hatred and did not cure it.) To fix America’s problems, we need to reach everyone from fringe white nationalists to single moms in Chicago, which is so costly and logistically complicated that there isn’t a clear path toward implementation.

One problem with proposals designed to reduce partisan animosity and antidemocratic beliefs, which at least three of the scholars I contacted mentioned, is that positive effects are almost immediately nullified by the hostile language in contemporary politics.

“The moralized political environment is a core problem,” Peter Ditto , a professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, wrote by email:

Unless we can bring the temperature down in the country, it is going to be hard to make progress on other fronts, like trying to debias citizens’ consumption of political information. The United States is stuck in this outrage spiral. Partisan animosity both fuels and is fueled by a growing fact gap between red and blue America.

Ditto argued that there is “good evidence for the effectiveness of accuracy prompts (correcting falsehoods) to reduce people’s belief in political misinformation,” but “attempting to reduce political polarization with accuracy prompts alone is like trying to start a mediation during a bar fight.”

Attempts to improve political decision making, Ditto added, “are unlikely to have a substantial effect unless we can tamp down the growing animosity felt between red and blue America. The United States has gone from a politics based on disagreement to one based on dislike, distrust, disrespect and often even disgust.”

Citing the Voelkel-Willer paper, Jay Van Bavel , a professor of psychology and neural science at N.Y.U., emailed me to express his belief that “there are solid, well-tested strategies for reducing affective polarization. These are possible on a large scale if there is sufficient political will.”

But Van Bavel quickly added that these strategies “are up against all the other factors that are currently driving conflict and animosity, including divisive leaders like Donald Trump, gerrymandering, hyperpartisan media (including social media), etc. It’s like trying to bail out the Titanic.”

Simply put, it is difficult, if not impossible, to attempt to counter polarization at a time when partisan sectarianism is intense and pervasive.

Bavel described polarization as

both an illness from various problems in our political system and an outcome. As a result, the solution is going to be extremely complex and involve different leadership (once Trump and his inner circle leave the scene, that will help a lot), as well as a number of structural changes (removing gerrymandering and other incentive structures that reinforce extremism).

Affective polarization, Bavel added,

is really just a disdain for the other political party. Political sectarianism seems to be an even worse form because now you see the other party as evil. Both of these are, of course, related to ideological polarization. But affective polarization and political sectarianism are different because they can make it impossible to cooperate with an opponent even when you agree. That’s why they are particularly problematic.

Stanley Feldman , a political scientist at Stony Brook University, pointed to another characteristic of polarization that makes it especially difficult to lower the temperature of the conflict between Republicans and Democrats: There are real, not imaginary, grounds for their mutual animosity.

In an email, Feldman wrote:

There is a reality to this conflict. There has been a great deal of social change in the U.S. over the past few decades. Gay marriage is legal, gender norms are changing, the country is becoming more secular, immigration has increased.

Because of this, Feldman added:

it’s a mistake to suggest this is like an illness or disease. We’re talking about people’s worldviews and beliefs. As much as we may see one side or the other to be misguided and a threat to democracy, it’s still important to try to understand and take seriously their perspective. And analogies to illness or pathology will not help to reduce conflict.

There are, in Feldman’s view,

two major factors that have contributed to this. First, national elections are extremely competitive now. Partisan control of the House and Senate could change at every election. Presidential elections are decided on razor-thin margins. This means that supporters of each party constantly see the possibility of losing power every election. This magnifies the perceived threat from the opposing party and increases negative attitudes toward the out-party.

The second factor?

The issues dividing the parties have changed. When the two parties fought over the size of government, taxes and social welfare programs, it was possible for partisans to imagine a compromise that is more or less acceptable even if not ideal. Compromise on issues like abortion, gender roles, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the role of religion is much more difficult, so losing feels like more of a threat to people’s values. Feldman continued:

From a broader perspective, these issues, as well as immigration and the declining white majority, reflect very different ideas of what sort of society the United States should be. This makes partisan conflict feel like an existential threat to an “American” way of life. Losing political power then feels like losing your country. And the opposing parties become seen as dangers to society.

These legitimately felt fears and anxieties in the electorate provide a fertile environment for elected officials, their challengers and other institutional forces to exacerbate division.

As Feldman put it:

It’s also important to recognize the extent to which politicians, the media, social media influencers and others have exacerbated perceptions of threat from social change. Take immigration, for example. People could be reminded of the history of immigration in the U.S.: how immigrants have contributed to American society, how second and third generations have assimilated, how previous fears of immigration have been unfounded. Instead there are voices increasing people’s fear of immigration, suggesting that immigrants are a threat to the country, dangerous and even less than human. Discussions of a “great replacement” theory, supposed attacks on religion, dangers of immigration and changing gender norms undermining men’s place in society magnify perceptions of threat from social change. Cynical politicians have learned that they can use fear and partisan hostility to their political advantage. As long as they think this is a useful strategy, it will be difficult to begin to reduce polarization and partisan hostility.

In other words, as long as Trump is the Republican nominee for president and as long as the prospect of a majority-minority country continues to propel right-wing populism, the odds of reducing the bitter animosity that now characterizes American politics remain slim.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here's our email: [email protected] .

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Thomas B. Edsall has been a contributor to the Times Opinion section since 2011. His column on strategic and demographic trends in American politics appears every Wednesday. He previously covered politics for The Washington Post. @ edsall

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South Africa will mark 30 years of freedom amid inequality, poverty and a tense election ahead

As 72-year-old Nonki Kunene walks through the corridors of Thabisang Primary School in Soweto, South Africa, she recalls the joy she and many others felt 30 years ago when they voted for the first time. It was at this school on April 27, 1994 that Kunene joined millions of South Africans to brave long queues and take part in the country’s first democratic elections. (AP video and production by Nqobile Ntshangase)

FILE - People queue to cast their votes In Soweto, South Africa April 27, 1994, in the country’s first all-race elections. In 1994 people braved long queues to cast a vote after years of white minority rule which denied Black South Africans the vote. (AP Photo/Denis Farrell. File)

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Nonki Kunene during an interview with The Associated Press in Soweto, South Africa, Monday, April 22, 2024. Thirty years ago Kunene joined thousands of South Africans who braved long queues to cast a vote in South Africa’s first ever elections after years of white minority rule which denied Black South Africans the vote. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

Nonki Kunene gestures during an interview with The Associated Press in Soweto, South Africa, Monday, April 22, 2024. Thirty years ago Kunene joined thousands of South Africans who braved long queues to cast a vote in South Africa’s first ever elections after years of white minority rule which denied Black South Africans the vote. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

Lily Makhanya opens the classroom door at Thabisang Primary School where she voted for the first time 30 years ago, in Soweto, South Africa, Monday, April 22, 2024. In 1994 Makhanya joined thousands of South Africans who braved long queues to cast a vote in South Africa’s first ever elections after years of white minority rule which denied Black South Africans the vote. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

Lily Makhanya at the Thabisang Primary School where she voted for the first time 30 years ago, in Soweto, South Africa, Monday, April 22, 2024. In 1994 Makhanya joined thousands of South Africans who braved long queues to cast a vote in South Africa’s first ever elections after years of white minority rule which denied Black South Africans the vote. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe)

FILE - Then African National Congress leader, Nelson Mandela casts his vote April 27, 1994 near Durban, South Africa, in the country’s first all-race elections. In 1994 people braved long queues to cast votes after years of white minority rule which denied Black South Africans the right to vote. (AP Photo/John Parkin. File)

FILE — Then African National Congress President Nelson Mandela, left, and secretary general Cyril Ramaphose, now South African President, right, at a news conference in Johannesburg Monday, August 30, 1993. On Saturday, April 27, 2024 the country will celebrate Freedom day when In 1994 people braved long queues to cast votes after years of white minority rule which denied Black South Africans the right to vote. (AP Photo/Denis Farrell/File)

FILE — A man walks along an informal settlement as a young girl plays next to the polluted Jukskei River in Alexandra, northern Johannesburg, South Africa Nov. 11, 2014. On Saturday, April 27, 2024 the country will celebrate Freedom Day when In 1994 people braved long queues to cast votes after years of white minority rule which denied Black South Africans the right to vote. (AP Photo/Themba Hadebe/File)

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — As 72-year-old Nonki Kunene walks through the corridors of Thabisang Primary School in Soweto, South Africa, she recalls the joy she and many others felt 30 years ago when they voted for the first time.

It was at this school on April 27, 1994, that Kunene joined millions of South Africans to brave long queues and take part in the country’s first democratic elections after decades of white minority rule which denied Black people the right to vote.

The country is gearing up for celebrations Saturday to mark 30 years of freedom and democracy. But much of the enthusiasm and optimism of that period has subsided as Africa’s most developed economy faces a myriad of challenges.

Like many things in South Africa, the school that Kunene remembers has changed, and what used to be a school hall has now been turned into several classrooms.

“I somehow wish we could go back to that day, because of how excited I was and the things that happened thereafter,” said Kunene, referring to Nelson Mandela becoming the country’s first Black president and the introduction of a new constitution that afforded all South Africans equal rights, abolishing the racially discriminative system of apartheid.

For many who experienced apartheid, those years remain etched in their collective memory.

“I cannot forget how we suffered at the hands of whites. In the city at night, there were white bikers with hair like this (describing a mohawk-like hairstyle) who would brutally assault a Black person if they saw them walking on a pavement. Those white boys were cruel,” said 87-year-old Lily Makhanya, whose late husband died while working in the anti-apartheid movement’s underground structures.

“If they saw you walking on the pavement, you would be assaulted so badly and left for dead.”

For Makhanya and many others who stood in those queues to vote in 1994, it represented a turning point from a brutal past to the promise of a prosperous future.

But 30 years later, much of that optimism has evaporated amid the country’s pressing challenges . They include widening inequality as the country’s Black majority continues to live in poverty with an unemployment rate of more than 32%, the highest in the world.

According to official statistics, more than 16 million South Africans rely on monthly welfare grants for survival.

Public demonstrations have become common as communities protest against the ruling African National Congress’ failure to deliver job opportunities and basic services like water and electricity.

An electricity crisis that has resulted in power blackouts that are devastating the country’s economy added to the party’s woes as businesses and homes are sometimes forced to go without electricity for up to 12 hours a day.

Areas like the affluent Johannesburg suburb of Sandton, which hosts beautiful skyscrapers and luxurious homes, are an example of the economic success enjoyed by a minority of the country’s 60 million people.

But the township of Alexandra, which lies a few kilometers (miles) from Sandton, is a stark reflection of the living conditions of the country’s poor Black majority, where sewage from burst pipes flows on the streets and uncollected rubbish piles up on pavements.

Such contradictions are common across the major cities, including the capital Pretoria and the city of Cape Town, and they remain at the center of what is expected to be one of the country’s most fiercely contested elections in May.

For the first time since the ANC came to power in 1994, polls are indicating that the party might receive less than 50% of the national vote, which would see it lose power unless it manages to form a coalition with some smaller parties.

For some younger voters like 24-year-old Donald Mkhwanazi, the nostalgia does not resonate.

Mkhwanazi will be voting for the first time in the May 29 election and is now actively involved in campaigning for a new political party, Rise Mzansi, which will be contesting a national election for the first time.

“I had an opportunity to vote in 2019, and in local elections in 2021, but I did not because I was not persuaded enough by any of these old parties about why I should vote,” he said.

“I didn’t see the need to vote because of what has been happening over the past 30 years. We talk about freedom, but are we free from crime, are we free from poverty? What freedom is this that we are talking about?”

Political analyst Pearl Mncube said South Africans are justified in feeling failed by their leaders.

“More and more South Africans have grown skeptical of pronouncements from government due to its history of continuously announcing grand plans without prioritizing the swift execution of said plans,” Mncube said.

She said while Freedom Day is meant to signify the country’s transition from an oppressive past, it was important to highlight current problems and plans to overcome them.

“We cannot use the past, and any nostalgia attached to it, to avoid accounting for the present,” she said.

AP Africa news: https://apnews.com/hub/africa

Freedom for the Wolves

Neoliberal orthodoxy holds that economic freedom is the basis of every other kind. That orthodoxy, a Nobel economist says, is not only false; it is devouring itself.

A ny discussion of freedom must begin with a discussion of whose freedom we’re talking about. The freedom of some to harm others, or the freedom of others not to be harmed? Too often, we have not balanced the equation well: gun owners versus victims of gun violence; chemical companies versus the millions who suffer from toxic pollution; monopolistic drug companies versus patients who die or whose health worsens because they can’t afford to buy medicine.

Understanding the meaning of freedom is central to creating an economic and political system that delivers not only on efficiency, equity, and sustainability but also on moral values. Freedom—understood as having inherent ties to notions of equity, justice, and well-being—is itself a central value. And it is this broad notion of freedom that has been given short shrift by powerful strands in modern economic thinking—notably the one that goes by the shorthand term neoliberalism , the belief that the freedom that matters most, and from which other freedoms indeed flow, is the freedom of unregulated, unfettered markets.

F. A. Hayek and Milton Friedman were the most notable 20th-century defenders of unrestrained capitalism. The idea of “unfettered markets”—markets without rules and regulations—is an oxymoron because without rules and regulations enforced by government, there could and would be little trade. Cheating would be rampant, trust low. A world without restraints would be a jungle in which only power mattered, determining who got what and who did what. It wouldn’t be a market at all.

Nonetheless, Hayek and Friedman argued that capitalism as they interpreted it, with free and unfettered markets, was the best system in terms of efficiency, and that without free markets and free enterprise, we could not and would not have individual freedom. They believed that markets on their own would somehow remain competitive. Remarkably, they had already forgotten—or ignored—the experiences of monopolization and concentration of economic power that had led to the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) and the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914). As government intervention grew in response to the Great Depression, Hayek worried that we were on “the road to serfdom,” as he put it in his 1944 book of that title; that is, on the road to a society in which individuals would become subservient to the state.

Rogé Karma: Why America abandoned the greatest economy in history

My own conclusions have been radically different. It was because of democratic demands that democratic governments, such as that of the U.S., responded to the Great Depression through collective action. The failure of governments to respond adequately to soaring unemployment in Germany led to the rise of Hitler. Today, it is neoliberalism that has brought massive inequalities and provided fertile ground for dangerous populists. Neoliberalism’s grim record includes freeing financial markets to precipitate the largest financial crisis in three-quarters of a century, freeing international trade to accelerate deindustrialization, and freeing corporations to exploit consumers, workers, and the environment alike. Contrary to what Friedman suggested in his 1962 book, Capitalism and Freedom , this form of capitalism does not enhance freedom in our society. Instead, it has led to the freedom of a few at the expense of the many. As Isaiah Berlin would have it: Freedom for the wolves; death for the sheep.

I t is remarkable that , in spite of all the failures and inequities of the current system, so many people still champion the idea of an unfettered free-market economy. This despite the daily frustrations of dealing with health-care companies, insurance companies, credit-card companies, telephone companies, landlords, airlines, and every other manifestation of modern society. When there’s a problem, ordinary citizens are told by prominent voices to “leave it to the market.” They’ve even been told that the market can solve problems that one might have thought would require society-wide action and coordination, some larger sense of the public good, and some measure of compulsion. It’s purely wishful thinking. And it’s only one side of the fairy tale. The other side is that the market is efficient and wise, and that government is inefficient and rapacious.

Mindsets, once created, are hard to change. Many Americans still think of the United States as a land of opportunity. They still believe in something called the American dream, even though for decades the statistics have painted a darker picture. The rate of absolute income mobility—that is, the percentage of children who earn more than their parents—has been declining steadily since the Second World War. Of course, America should aspire to be a land of opportunity, but clinging to beliefs that are not supported by today’s realities—and that hold that markets by themselves are a solution to today’s problems—is not helpful. Economic conditions bear this out, as more Americans are coming to understand. Unfettered markets have created, or helped create, many of the central problems we face, including manifold inequalities, the climate crisis, and the opioid crisis. And markets by themselves cannot solve any of our large, collective problems. They cannot manage the massive structural changes that we are going through—including global warming, artificial intelligence, and the realignment of geopolitics.

All of these issues present inconvenient truths to the free-market mindset. If externalities such as these are important, then collective action is important. But how to come to collective agreement about the regulations that govern society? Small communities can sometimes achieve a broad consensus, though typically far from unanimity. Larger societies have a harder go of it. Many of the crucial values and presumptions at play are what economists, philosophers, and mathematicians refer to as “primitives”—underlying assumptions that, although they can be debated, cannot be resolved. In America today we are divided over such assumptions, and the divisions have widened.

The consequences of neoliberalism point to part of the reason: specifically, growing income and wealth disparities and the polarization caused by the media. In theory, economic freedom was supposed to be the bedrock basis for political freedom and democratic health. The opposite has proved to be true. The rich and the elites have a disproportionate voice in shaping both government policies and societal narratives. All of which leads to an enhanced sense by those who are not wealthy that the system is rigged and unfair, which makes healing divisions all the more difficult.

Chris Murphy: The wreckage of neoliberalism

As income inequalities grow, people wind up living in different worlds. They don’t interact. A large body of evidence shows that economic segregation is widening and has consequences, for instance, with regard to how each side thinks and feels about the other. The poorest members of society see the world as stacked against them and give up on their aspirations; the wealthiest develop a sense of entitlement, and their wealth helps ensure that the system stays as it is.

The media, including social media, provide another source of division. More and more in the hands of a very few, the media have immense power to shape societal narratives and have played an obvious role in polarization. The business model of much of the media entails stoking divides. Fox News, for instance, discovered that it was better to have a devoted right-wing audience that watched only Fox than to have a broader audience attracted to more balanced reporting. Social-media companies have discovered that it’s profitable to get engagement through enragement. Social-media sites can develop their algorithms to effectively refine whom to target even if that means providing different information to different users.

N eoliberal theorists and their beneficiaries may be happy to live with all this. They are doing very well by it. They forget that, for all the rhetoric, free markets can’t function without strong democracies beneath them—the kind of democracies that neoliberalism puts under threat. In a very direct way, neoliberal capitalism is devouring itself.

Not only are neoliberal economies inefficient at dealing with collective issues, but neoliberalism as an economic system is not sustainable on its own. To take one fundamental element: A market economy runs on trust. Adam Smith himself emphasized the importance of trust, recognizing that society couldn’t survive if people brazenly followed their own self-interest rather than good codes of conduct:

The regard to those general rules of conduct, is what is properly called a sense of duty, a principle of the greatest consequence in human life, and the only principle by which the bulk of mankind are capable of directing their actions … Upon the tolerable observance of these duties, depends the very existence of human society, which would crumble into nothing if mankind were not generally impressed with a reverence for those important rules of conduct.

For instance, contracts have to be honored. The cost of enforcing every single contract through the courts would be unbearable. And with no trust in the future, why would anybody save or invest? The incentives of neoliberal capitalism focus on self-interest and material well-being, and have done much to weaken trust. Without adequate regulation, too many people, in the pursuit of their own self-interest, will conduct themselves in an untrustworthy way, sliding to the edge of what is legal, overstepping the bounds of what is moral. Neoliberalism helps create selfish and untrustworthy people. A “businessman” like Donald Trump can flourish for years, even decades, taking advantage of others. If Trump were the norm rather than the exception, commerce and industry would grind to a halt.

We also need regulations and laws to make sure that there are no concentrations of economic power. Business seeks to collude and would do so even more in the absence of antitrust laws. But even playing within current guardrails, there’s a strong tendency for the agglomeration of power. The neoliberal ideal of free, competitive markets would, without government intervention, be evanescent.

We’ve also seen that those with power too often do whatever they can to maintain it. They write the rules to sustain and enhance power, not to curb or diminish it. Competition laws are eviscerated. Enforcement of banking and environmental laws is weakened. In this world of neoliberal capitalism, wealth and power are ever ascendant.

Neoliberalism undermines the sustainability of democracy—the opposite of what Hayek and Friedman intended or claimed. We have created a vicious circle of economic and political inequality, one that locks in more freedom for the rich and leaves less for the poor, at least in the United States, where money plays such a large role in politics.

Read: When Milton Friedman ran the show

There are many ways in which economic power gets translated into political power and undermines the fundamental democratic value of one person casting one vote. The reality is that some people’s voices are much louder than others. In some countries, accruing power is as crude as literally buying votes, with the wealthy having more money to buy more votes. In advanced countries, the wealthy use their influence in the media and elsewhere to create self-serving narratives that in turn become the conventional wisdom. For instance, certain rules and regulations and government interventions—tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, deregulation of key industries—that are purely in the interest of the rich and powerful are also, it is said, in the national interest. Too often that viewpoint is swallowed wholesale. If persuasion doesn’t work, there is always fear: If the banks are not bailed out, the economic system will collapse, and everyone will be worse off. If the corporate tax rate is not cut, firms will leave and go to other jurisdictions that are more business-friendly.

Is a free society one in which a few dictate the terms of engagement? In which a few control the major media and use that control to decide what the populace sees and hears? We now inhabit a polarized world in which different groups live in different universes, disagreeing not only on values but on facts.

A strong democracy can’t be sustained by neoliberal economics for a further reason. Neoliberalism has given rise to enormous “rents”—the monopoly profits that are a major source of today’s inequalities. Much is at stake, especially for many in the top one percent, centered on the enormous accretion of wealth that the system has allowed. Democracy requires compromise if it is to remain functional, but compromise is difficult when there is so much at stake in terms of both economic and political power.

A free-market, competitive, neoliberal economy combined with a liberal democracy does not constitute a stable equilibrium—not without strong guardrails and a broad societal consensus on the need to curb wealth inequality and money’s role in politics. The guardrails come in many forms, such as competition policy, to prevent the creation, maintenance, and abuse of market power. We need checks and balances, not just within government, as every schoolchild in the U.S. learns, but more broadly within society. Strong democracy, with widespread participation, is also part of what is required, which means working to strike down laws intended to decrease democratic participation or to gerrymander districts where politicians will never lose their seats.

Whether America’s political and economic system today has enough safeguards to sustain economic and political freedoms is open to serious question.

U nder the very name of freedom, neoliberals and their allies on the radical right have advocated policies that restrict the opportunities and freedoms, both political and economic, of the many in favor of the few. All these failures have hurt large numbers of people around the world, many of whom have responded by turning to populism, drawn to authoritarian figures like Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Vladimir Putin, and Narendra Modi.

Perhaps we should not be surprised by where the U.S. has landed. It is a country now so divided that even a peaceful transition of power is difficult, where life expectancy is the lowest among advanced nations, and where we can’t agree about truth or how it might best be ascertained or verified. Conspiracy theories abound. The values of the Enlightenment have to be relitigated daily.

There are good reasons to worry whether America’s form of ersatz capitalism and flawed democracy is sustainable. The incongruities between lofty ideals and stark realities are too great. It’s a political system that claims to cherish freedom above all else but in many ways is structured to deny or restrict freedoms for many of its citizens.

I do believe that there is broad consensus on key elements of what constitutes a good and decent society, and on what kind of economic system supports that society. A good society, for instance, must live in harmony with nature. Our current capitalism has made a mess of this. A good society allows individuals to flourish and live up to their potential. In terms of education alone, our current capitalism is failing large portions of the population. A good economic system would encourage people to be honest and empathetic, and foster the ability to cooperate with others. The current capitalist system encourages the antithesis.

But the key first step is changing our mindset. Friedman and Hayek argued that economic and political freedoms are intimately connected, with the former necessary for the latter. But the economic system that has evolved—largely under the influence of these thinkers and others like them—undermines meaningful democracy and political freedom. In the end, it will undermine the very neoliberalism that has served them so well.

For a long time, the right has tried to establish a monopoly over the invocation of freedom , almost as a trademark. It’s time to reclaim the word.

This article has been adapted from Joseph E. Stiglitz’s new book, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society .

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Support for this project was provided by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.