Emerging Trends in The Social and Behavioral Sciences

Political Inequality

Item

Title

Political Inequality

Author

Manza, Jeff

Research Area

Class, Status and Power

Topic

Social and Economic Inequality

Abstract

In the classical model of democracy, governments are responsive to the mass public, making public policies favored by a majority of citizens while respecting the rights of minorities. In the real world, of course, no political system, democratic or otherwise, has ever fully realized this principle of political equality. The focus of this essay is an examination of research on how economic inequalities impact democratic politics. The question has become especially pressing as economic inequality has risen, in some countries quite dramatically, in recent decades. Political inequality may refer to either differential inputs into policymaking processes, in which some actors have more influence than others, or it can refer to policy outputs, in particular those which encourage or sustain income and wealth inequality. In this essay, I review four contemporary theories of political inequality (elite and oligarchic models, power resources theories, globalization models, and participatory inequality models). Each throws light on some aspects of political inequality, but none provides a completely satisfactory account. I conclude with some suggestions for future directions for research.

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extracted text

Political Inequality
JEFF MANZA

Abstract
In the classical model of democracy, governments are responsive to the mass public,
making public policies favored by a majority of citizens while respecting the rights of
minorities. In the real world, of course, no political system, democratic or otherwise,
has ever fully realized this principle of political equality. The focus of this essay is an
examination of research on how economic inequalities impact democratic politics.
The question has become especially pressing as economic inequality has risen, in
some countries quite dramatically, in recent decades. Political inequality may refer
to either differential inputs into policymaking processes, in which some actors have
more influence than others, or it can refer to policy outputs, in particular those which
encourage or sustain income and wealth inequality. In this essay, I review four
contemporary theories of political inequality (elite and oligarchic models, power
resources theories, globalization models, and participatory inequality models). Each
throws light on some aspects of political inequality, but none provides a completely
satisfactory account. I conclude with some suggestions for future directions for
research.

INTRODUCTION
Modern democratic political systems claim legitimacy by asserting that all
citizens have equal opportunities to shape the composition of their elected
governments and the resulting public policies. In the classical model of
democracy, governments are responsive to the mass public, making public
policies favored by a majority of citizens while respecting the rights of
minorities. In the real world, of course, no political system, democratic or
otherwise, has ever fully realized this principle of political equality (Dahl,
1998). However, in recent decades, rising income and wealth inequalities,
combined with the seeming inability of democratic governments to promote
a greater sharing of the fruits of economic growth, has prompted renewed
interest in the question of how economic inequalities impact political systems. The potential for redistribution through democratic political systems
in capitalist societies, where all citizens have the right to vote, is an issue that
has exercised social science imaginations since the dawn of mass democracy.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

150 years on, it is clear that this scenario has not yet come to pass, and
there are few signs suggesting the future might be different or even that the
introduction of democracy necessarily leads to redistribution (Ross, 2006).
The inevitable puzzle, as Shapiro (2002) pithily puts it, is “why don’t the
[vastly more numerous] poor soak the rich?”
If we take the long view, there is little doubt that democratic political systems have been associated with redistribution via the adoption of various
social welfare policies and welfare state institutions, which have become universal and enduringly popular. The rise of the welfare state since the late
nineteenth century has unquestionably enhanced economic opportunity and
raised living standards across the entire population and across the life course
(Garfinkel, Smeeding, & Rainwater, 2010). However, it now appears to most
commentators that we have reached the end of the “golden age” of welfare
state expansion (Pierson, 2001; Streeck, 2012). The political choices that have
been made in the past couple of decades have allowed inequality to surge.
In the longer run of history, the relatively egalitarian twentieth century (and
the innovations in tax and transfer systems adopted, especially in the decades
after World War II) may prove to be the exception to the long-run bias of capitalism toward inegalitarian outcomes (Piketty, 2014). And if so, the sources
of inequality in democratic political systems are likely to provide one key to
understanding this shift. (One could, of course, make similar claims about
authoritarian capitalist societies, but that is not the target of this essay.)
My focus is to get at these larger questions with a somewhat narrower
agenda: what have we learned about are the mechanisms through which
economic inequality impacts democratic politics, and what should future
research address more thoroughly? Political inequality can take one of two
different forms: It may refer to either differential inputs into policymaking
processes, in which some actors have more influence than others, or it can
refer to policy outputs, in particular those which encourage or sustain income
and wealth inequality. It is certainly not obvious that political inequality
should be common feature of democratic political systems. In the classical
pluralist vision of democracy, for example, the resources of affluent actors
in democratic systems can be offset by mobilization of citizens and groups
“from below”; in Galbraith’s (1952) famous formulation, democratic political
systems can be relatively egalitarian and produce redistributive outcomes so
long as ordinary citizens have sufficient “countervailing power” to contest
economic and political elites. Countervailing power is most likely to be
produced by strong unions, social movements from below, or electorally
competitive left (or social democratic) political parties advancing redistributive policy programs. However, in an era of nearly universal union decline
(Silver, 2003; Wallerstein & Western, 2000) and the gradual retreat of social
democratic parties toward less redistributive positions (Therborn, 2008),

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the weakening of countervailing power now appears to be a central fact of
contemporary democratic capitalism.
FOUNDATIONS
The claim that entrenched biases toward favoring certain kinds of actors
and interests over others arises from some very basic elements of capitalist
democracy. No elected government (subject to periodic reevaluation by its
citizens) can afford to allow a severe economic contraction brought on by
declining business investment if it hopes to remain electorally competitive
(Block, 1987; Lindblom, 1977). Maintaining conditions favorable to investment thus provides a kind of structural power available to the very largest
of individual economic actors, and more generally to politically organized
peak business associations. Block (1987, Chapter 4) nicely captures this
idea with the notion of “business confidence” as the mechanism of structural power that all democratically elected governments must pay some
heed to.
Further, there are easily demonstrable disparities in the class power of different groups, with corporate interests in particular having advantages not
shared by poor people or a disorganized working class. Offe and Wisenthal
(Offe, 1985, Chapter 7) offered one elegant formulation of this idea, arguing
that while the working class had to organize large and often diffuse groups
into unions or social movements, business interests could often exert power
on governments with the mere threat of disinvestment or departure. A single large employer acting on its own has leverage that other groups can only
acquire with high levels of organization.
Taken together, the business confidence and power disparities inherent
to contemporary capitalism create structural conditions for a bias toward
protecting and promoting the interests of economic elites and firms over
everyone else. However, this “structural power” hypothesis has not proved
easy to rigorously test. Classical examples of democratically elected left
governments with an explicitly socialist policy agenda that would unquestionably threaten business confidence are few and far between. Where they
have appeared (e.g., the experience of the French socialists led by President
Francois Mitterand after 1981, the Chilean government under Salvador
Allende in the early 1970s, or the Swedish social democrats in the late 1970s
when the Party’s radical Meidner Plan to promote worker ownership of private firms was shelved once in office) exemplify some of the rapid pressures
that can arise to abandon their program in favor of moderation. However,
systematic analyses with cross-national data are difficult; Przeworski and
Wallerstein (1988) developed one such examination, finding little support
for the structural power hypothesis.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Aside from being pitched a high level of abstraction, another key problem
for the structural power hypothesis is to account for the fact that every rich
democracy has adopted welfare state initiatives in the face of widespread
opposition by economic elites. In no case have high marginal tax rates on
individual earners—or indeed, any income or corporate taxes at all!—been
adopted without significant ferocious opposition. Similarly, taxes on business profits were, and remain, bitterly contested. Pro-union legislation,
which has enhanced the ability of unions to organize workers, carry out
strikes, and promote collective bargaining over employment terms, has similarly been resisted (at least in its early stages); however, in most countries,
measures to assist union organizing were eventually adopted. Finally, redistributive social programs—most notably national health insurance schemes
and universal pensions—have often been unpopular with putatively power
economic interests but steadily expanded throughout most of the twentieth
century.
In view of such observations and examples, it would be folly to assume
that democratic political systems in capitalist societies cannot promote redistribution, or that the structural power of capital precludes it. However, this
still leaves a key puzzle: In the early decades of the twenty-first century,
democratic governments appear mostly unable to provide continuing benefits and wage growth to the median voter, whereas in most countries, the
very highest earners are seeing their share of income and wealth grow handsomely. Further, social programs benefitting either the median voter or the
poor appear squeezed in a variety of ways, between rising cost pressures
from below and an inability of national governments to increase revenue to
pay for them (Gough & Therborn, 2010). Understanding these patterns suggests the need for a theory of political inequality. I explore leading theoretical
models in the following section.
CONTEMPORARY THEORY AND RESEARCH
ELITE AND OLIGARCHIC THEORIES
One classical model of political inequality hypothesized that a small handful
of actors eventually come to dominate all political systems, democratic
or authoritarian (Michels, 1966 [1911]; Pareto, 1968 [1901]). In the modern
reformulation of elite theory, beginning with Mills (1956), political elites
are viewed as being drawn from a narrow set of institutions with similar
social backgrounds and networks, and they will tend to use political power
to serve their own ends. Elites dominate political offices via selection
mechanisms they control (i.e., who gets into the elite, or who is eligible to
be considered for key appointments in policymaking offices) and by having

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5

disproportionate influence over the outputs of policymaking processes
(Domhoff, 2010, Chapter 3). Elites typically hail from a narrow range of
educational institutions, with schools increasingly displacing families as
the locus of selection (Bourdieu, 1998; Kahn, 2009). Once selected into
elite institutions, individual aspirants must exhibit appropriate levels of
conformity and performance to be advanced up the ranks. Elite status is not
necessarily linked to a particular ideology, political partisanship, or wealth
(elites can have a range of views on political issues, can be found in all major
political parties, and may or may not have personal or familial wealth).
However, because of selection and shared training, elites will tend to share
common views, or at least collectively maintain a narrow range of opinions
that will differ from the rest of the public.
In recent decades, as meritocracy as become an increasingly common
foundation for elite selection (Hayes, 2010), diversity in terms of sociodemographic background is increased (e.g., women and members from minority
group backgrounds have become more common) (see Kahn, 2009; Zweigenhaft & Domhoff, 2006). However, this alone does not necessarily mean that
elite cohesion is declining; as long as the experience of socialization and
selection remain robust. However, whether the elite can plausibly be said
to have a set of common interests is more complicated. From Mills (1956)
onward, there has been a tendency to identify the elite as all of those holding
positions of power in important institutions. This wide-ranging view makes
it difficult to specify the basis on which elites will have common interests.
However, even if we limit the conception to the corporate elite, the problem
is not solved. It is not difficult to show that conflicts within the corporate
community are rampant (Mizruchi, 2013, pp. 15–17). Different firms and
industries are inevitably going to favor different public policies, and perhaps
only at the very top or under certain unique historical contexts is unity
possible (Mizruchi, 2013; Useem, 1984).
In a wide-ranging recent work, Jeffrey Winters (2011) proposes an alternative to elite theory as the foundation for political inequality by focusing more
narrowly on the ways in which the largest wealth holders use political means
to protect their assets from forfeiture. No matter how it is drawn, the entire
“elite” will not have a common interest in protecting large fortunes, as only a
minority of their members will control such fortunes (2011, p. 26ff). Further,
at least in democratic societies, political elites may well have motivations
to promote popular policies, including redistributive ones, which enhance
their electability (in this way, elite theory elides key contrasts between social
democratic and conservative elites). By contrast, Winters argues that large
wealth holders in all societies share a single decisive common interest in the
protection of their fortunes. This motivates them to work within the institutional and political constraints of the context they are living to try to achieve

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

it. These individuals whom Winters refers to as oligarchs are defined by the
possession of sufficient amounts of wealth to engage in what he calls income
defense.
In Winters’ comparative-historical framework, oligarchy can take a wide
variety of forms in different society, depending on whether the principle
threat to wealth comes is competition from other oligarchs, threats to their
wealth holdings from governments (principally in the form of taxation), or
from citizens from below (especially if there is no legal framework capable
of securing protection of private property). In contemporary democracies,
where private property rights are well secured by rule of law, the principle threat to oligarchs is exposure to taxation. Tax avoidance is assisted by
the endless variety of strategies created by an “income defense industry”
that specializes in reducing tax exposure and operates on an increasingly
global scale (Winters, 2011, Chapter 5). Oligarchs are motivated to use political means to limit marginal income tax rates, estate taxes, and promote a
stealthy politics in which wealth and income can be protected through loopholes and exemptions (most notably through overseas storage of wealth subject to minimal or no taxation).
Winters produces some startling historical evidence in favor of the basic
insights of the oligarchy model as a key to understanding political inequality around the world and over time. For example, he shows that the gap
between the richest 1% and the bottom 20% is likely far greater in contemporary societies like the United States (or even Sweden) than the gaps between
the wealthiest 1% and lower strata, even in some cases slaves, in ancient
Greece and Rome. The inability of social democratic countries in Northern
Europe to rein in the wealthiest of families has allowed for the maintenance of
wealth and even permitted the very top in recent years to take off. Finally, the
increasing prominence of the financial sector in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries, both for governments seeking to encourage or maintain growth and for high net-wealth individuals, creates the perfect synergy
for both wealth and income defense (cf. Piketty, 2014).
In spite of its insights, the oligarchy model does not provide much leverage
over the full range of policy inputs and outputs that shape the distribution
of income and wealth across the population. There is also an open question
as to how and why the most important policy shifts favoring oligarchs—first
the rise, then the decline in high marginal rates on top income earners, and
rise and decline of corporate income taxes as well—has happened in virtually
all rich democracies since the 1960s. In the immediate post-World War II era,
marginal tax rates on the highest earning households approached or in some
cases exceeded 90% in many countries. Today, virtually no affluent country
has a marginal income tax rate on top earners above 50%, and in some cases,
effective tax rates are substantially lower. Further, the startling decline in the

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7

rates—and in a number of countries, the outright elimination—of estate taxes
provides another intriguing puzzle: Why would working and middle-class
voters allow such reforms to proceed when they themselves have virtually
no chance of benefitting from them? Oligarchs may have disproportionate
power, but even on key questions of importance to oligarchs other actors
play important roles.
POWER RESOURCES
If the elite and oligarchic models cannot tell us much about how distributive politics for the bottom 99% of the population, we need to turn to
other models for an account of why the variation in redistribution policy
outputs between, say, Norway and the United States are as wide as they
are. The dominant political sociological model for studying comparative
political inequality in recent decades has been what is loosely known as
the power resources approach (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Korpi, 1983). This
approach starts from the assumption that unequal economic relationships,
particularly as exemplified in the class structure, facilitate the formation of
organized groups (or classes, in the Marxian-inspired terminology of early
power resources theory) and ultimately political parties with distinct and
competing interests. Within capitalist democracies, elections—what Korpi
(1983) once influentially called the democratic class struggle—is thus a central
mechanism for political redistribution. However, because the political
capacities of core classes such as industrial owners, farmers, and manual
workers vary over time, as their size and organizational capacity shifts, the
subsequent development of welfare states reflects the institutionalization of
different patterns of class alliance. For instance, when a highly organized
working class is successfully allied with farmers, this tends to facilitate the
emergence of welfare states with extensive social provisions, as in the case
of Sweden. There, universal social security programs were implemented in
conjunction with price subsidies for farmers. By contrast, when the working
class has high levels of regional or racial/ethnic fragmentation that inhibit
class alliances, the interests of employers will figure more centrally in regime
development, as in the case of the United States (Alesina & Glaser, 2004;
Esping-Andersen, 1990). In such cases, social spending and the provision of
government services are likely considerably more restricted.
One of the strengths of the power resources model is that it can account for
variability of economic and political inequalities, depending on the organizational capacity of key social groups. Analysts have postulated the existence
of different types of welfare state “regimes,” in which distinct combinations
of social groups and political parties can be found. In the most common such
typology, associated with the work of Esping-Andersen (1990), there are three

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

ideal types: social democracies (typically those of Northern Europe), Christian democracies (common in Continental Europe), and liberal democracies
(primarily in the Anglo-American countries). In each case, a combination of
similar political forces and political institutions give rise to similar kinds of
policy outputs. The “three worlds” model has been vigorously tested over
the years, with different analysts deriving different clusters depending on
the question and dataset under investigation, but generally finding evidence
supporting the utility of the regime clusters idea as a way of sorting through
cross-national variation (cf. Arts & Gelissen, 2010). Alternative formulations
of the distinctive institutional systems can be found in the “varieties of capitalism” literature (Pontusson, 2005; Soskice & Hall, 2001).
Despite its leverage over comparative outcomes, questions about the
power resources model abound. Perhaps most importantly, in an era where
unions and social democratic parties are declining or retreating from historic
commitments, redistributive social spending in many countries has persisted at high levels (albeit not enough to reverse rising income inequality).
This is a puzzle for power resources theory because the model predicts
social spending to decline. An additional problem is that it assumes a unidimensional form of political alignment, from left to right organized along
preferences for redistribution, which impacts political alignment (Iversen,
2010, pp. 187–188). Yet in many ways, real-world political contests are not
structured that way. Multiple political cleavages, as Lipset [1981 (1961)]
postulated many years ago, can undermine the expression of class politics, as
when working-class voters prefer a right-wing anti-immigrant party, or the
party opposed to affirmative action, or the party advocating “traditional”
family values. Further confused divisions arise when middle-class voters are
drawn to left parties advocating gender equality, tolerance and social rights
for minorities, or stronger environmentalist policies. Such noneconomic
motivations have the potential to break up class-based alignments, and
where especially strong can undermine support for more equality.
THE GLOBALIZATION HYPOTHESIS
A prominent focus of much social science work on the sources of rising political inequality in the modern world has centered on globalization, or more
specifically how increased flows (of trade, people, and investment) across
borders have reduced the capacity of governments to adopt or maintain
policies that would limit economic inequalities. Globalization arguments
have been marshaled to anticipate negative trends in contemporary welfare
state development and, by proxy, political inequality. Here, the growing
international mobility of capital is viewed as inducing “race to the bottom”:
that is, pressures on governments seeking to maintain competitiveness

Political Inequality

9

and avoid disinvestment lead governments to avoid adopting tax and
transfer programs that will discourage investment. In limiting the policy
options available to national governments, economic globalization provides
incentive for policymakers to turn away from traditional forms of social
provision in favor of growth politics that favor capital accumulation.
Using established measures of welfare state output (e.g., as a percentage
of GDP), globalization’s core dimensions can at best be said to have had a
modest, at times positive, influence (Brady, 2010; Iversen, 2010). The impact
of globalization on the ability of governments to raise tax revenues has similarly been shown to be quite limited or nonexistent, even if governments
have tended to move toward more market-conforming patterns of taxation
(e.g., lowering the highest marginal rates, and reducing or eliminating direct
corporate taxation in favor of broader based taxation such as consumption
taxes; see Swank, 2006).
This emerging consensus about the limited impact of globalization
(see Swank, 2010) fits quite well with seminal early commentaries on
issues of globalization and national sovereignty. For example, individual
nation-states, particularly small polities whose economies have always
depended on high levels of trade and participation in the world economy,
have adjusted continuously in the postwar era to anticipate the uncertainties
associated with globalization rather than merely being swallowed by them
(Garrett, 1998; Soskice & Hall, 2001). Further, many social policies aimed
at reducing poverty and inequality, such as jobs training programs and
disability services, can actually enhance economic productivity and global
competitiveness. Social policy innovations within many European nations
can be viewed as a bulwark against deindustrialization and related economic
threats arising from globalization (Iversen, 2010). In short, recent patterns of
economic globalization thus appear quite compatible with the maintenance
of contemporary welfare states, and need not increase political inequality.
PARTICIPATORY INEQUALITIES: POLITICAL INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS
If the broadest of claims about globalization’s impacts appear overstated,
there at least one way that it is plausibly linked to rising political inequality: by enhancing the divide between those who have full access to politicians
and policymakers, and those whose rights or powers are limited in some way.
These participatory inequalities, as we might call them, have both domestic
and international roots. The seemingly simple right to vote—foundation for
democratic equality—is no longer so simple when growing proportions of
national populations are immigrants (and thereby ineligible to participate).
In the powerful analysis of McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal (2006) on the US

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

case, rising immigration (in first the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and then again since the 1970s) is associated with both rising economic
inequality and political polarization (with the latter seen as reinforcing trends
toward disenfranchisement and making redistributive policies more difficult). McCarty et al. view that the critical mechanism of immigration’s impact
is political disenfranchisement. Because immigrants are disproportionately
located at the lower rungs of the labor market, as they grow in size the median
voter shifts upward while the bottom groups have artificially reduced political power.
Other types of participatory inequalities have been proposed. A classical
question regarding political inequality concerns group differences in voter
turnout; if well-resourced groups participate in elections at higher levels than
everyone else, a type of de facto inequality emerges even if the right to vote
is universal (Lijphart, 1997). One key conclusion in the literature is that when
overall turnout rates are very high, there are not likely to be a meaningful skew among those who participate. However, as turnout rates drop—a
phenomenon that is occurring in many countries, especially among younger
voters (Franklin, 2004)—the potential for participatory disparities grows. In
countries where turnout rates have historically been low, such as the United
States, it is very likely that policy outcomes have been impacted in favor of
higher resourced groups because of turnout skews (Leighley & Nagler, 2013).
Participation disparities go well beyond voting to include many other ways
in which citizens seek to influence politicians: writing letters or contacting
politicians directly, participating in civic groups, donating money to political causes, and so forth (Scholzman, Verba, & Brady, 2012). The further away
from the simplest political acts we look, the more likely that higher resourced
individuals are going to be participating at much greater rates.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
A central challenge for contemporary research on political inequality has
been to persuasively demonstrate the causal linkages between economic
and political inequalities. The claim that unequal political inputs—or policy
outputs—are, in fact, characteristic of modern political systems has not
proved a simple or straightforward proposition. To go further, researchers
will need to move beyond broad theoretical models that we have at present,
to get “inside” the centers of decision-making, and also to pay more attention to the microfoundations of citizens’ policy attitudes as an adjunct to
understanding why inequality is rising without strong pushback from below.
To give a brief flavor of these challenges, my discussion in this section will
consider in a bit more detail some of the research on the country where rising
economic inequality has been most rapid, and where the political system is

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11

widely thought to be the most open to elite influence: the United States. It is
hard to imagine a national context that would be more likely to have a political system characterized by inequality than the United States. Yet even here
the mechanics of political inequality have proved difficult to specify in adequate detail. There are no shortage of leading contenders that social scientists
have explored in recent years, and I will consider three: (i) The extraordinary
amount of money donated to candidates running for office, which is vastly
higher than in all other democratic countries and has grown steadily over the
past four decades with growing contributions from both affluent individuals
and corporate political action committees; (ii) The system of interest group
lobbying of legislators and regulators, again unique in American politics in
terms of the amount of expenditures devoted and the growth over time in
lobbying activities; (iii) The limits of a two-party system, in which there is no
traditionally social democratic party and one in which party polarization has
increased in recent decades.
None of these standard explanations has provided a firm and robust set of
conclusions, and each remains in need of further explication to understand.
Let us start with political money. American politics have always been awash
with cash, as First Amendment principles have equated “free speech” with
the right to invest in politics and permitted Congress relatively little scope
for setting limits on political investment. Therefore, how and in what ways
might the increased flow political money in recent decades matter? Theories
of “investor” influence on the parties and legislation have proved difficult
to definitively test and validate. The dominant thrust of the recent literature,
however, strongly suggests that the impact of money is modest at best (for
an authoritative review, see Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, & Snyder, 2003).
In particular, it is never the case that the amount of money coming from any
one donor is of sufficient magnitude to insure a legislator’s vote, especially
as the totals being raised have grown so dramatically. Other factors—party
membership, legislator’s ideology and beliefs, public opinion (perceived or
actual), or strategic calculations about how a vote will impact future career
prospects—have greater measurable impact on legislative behavior in the
most serious research on the topic. This does not mean that large political
donations are irrelevant; they can provide the donor with a kind of insider
access to elected officials that enable donors to press their case or perhaps
gain tax breaks or exemptions inserted into legislation that is largely hidden
from the public view (Clawson, Neustadtl, & Weller, 1998). However, to see
how such access works, social scientists will have to develop new sorts of
data and evidence than we have at the present time.
The system of interest group lobbying has similarly failed to show conclusive evidence that in spite of the mammoth sums spent by corporations, business associations, professional associations, unions, and others, the direction

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of policy is skewed in one direction or the other. The most comprehensive
and systematic recent examination (Baumgartner, Berry, Hojnacki, Kimball,
& Leech, 2009) finds that well-funded corporate lobbies do not prevail any
more often than poorly citizens groups, and perhaps more importantly it is
simply very difficult for any group to shift (or re-frame) the status quo no
matter how much they spend attempting to do so. Other scholarship has
reached similar conclusions (Burstein, 2014; Gilens, 2012, Chapter 5; McKay,
2012). Political lobbying is perhaps better viewed as an arms race—given its
pervasiveness, few groups will feel comfortable not participating, so everyone does it, but the impacts are mixed, hard to pin down, and in general
cannot systematically explain political inequality.
The party system is the third leg of the trio of factors most often pointed to
account for political inequality in America. In particular, changes in the two
major parties since the 1970s appear plausibly linked to policy outputs favoring economic elites, but here again some caution in reaching firm conclusions
is warranted. The Republican Party has unquestionably moved significantly
to the right in recent decades (cf. McCarty et al., 2006), developing and
maintaining an anti-tax, anti-government agenda, and enforcing discipline
on members in a unique way for an American party (cf. Hacker & Pierson,
2005, 2010; Orenstein and Mann, 2011). When in control of both the White
House and Congress, the Party has sponsored major tax reductions and more
recently pressed for substantial reductions in the size and scope of government responsibility. Time-series analyses suggest that Republican presidents
since the 1950s have allowed inequality to grow faster than Democratic
Presidents (Bartels, 2008; Kelly, 2009). Yet several questions remain in need of
further research before the party-centered account could prove adequate. For
example, many key policy initiatives adopted or promoted by Republican
politicians appear to have had broad public support (cf. Gilens, 2012, Chapter
6, noting that in his dataset, the most responsive Presidency since the 1960s
was that of George W. Bush). To what extent were these policies the result of
party activism, or were they more simply the result of underlying views of
the mass public that made it easy to adopt (as Bartels, 2008 has suggested)?
CONCLUSION
Democracy as a political system promises equality of participation and
influence to everyone. Political inequality is not necessarily inevitable, but
the experience of the past couple of decades suggests that democratic political systems may struggle to contain rising income and wealth inequality in
the twenty-first century, and perhaps even more strongly rising economic
inequality has the potential to increase political inequality. There are a
variety of contemporary theoretical models that point to various factors to

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13

account for how and why political inequality arises, or when it is muted. No
one of these models, however, appears to provide a bulletproof explanation.
Perhaps more pressingly, future research needs to get inside capitalist
democracy more fully than it has. Much of the current theorizing is at a
macro level of abstraction that would benefit from deeper exploration of
how policy inputs and outputs are related. To sharpen this point, this essay
concluded with a discussion of the dilemmas and difficulties of explaining
political inequality in the United States, seemingly the easiest case. Certainly,
we can be sure that pressure on social scientists to account for the political
sources of economic inequality is likely to grow in the future.
REFERENCES
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difference. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Ansolabehere, S., de Figueiredo, J., & Snyder, J. (2003). Why is there so little money
in U.S. politics? Journal of Economic Perspectives, 17, 105–130.
Arts, W., & Gelissen, J. (2010). Models of the welfare state. In F. Castles, S. Leibfried,
J. Lewis, H. Obinger & C. Pierson (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the welfare state (pp.
569–583). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Bartels, L. (2008). Unequal democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Baumgartner, F., Berry, J., Hojnacki, M., Kimball, D. C., & Leech, B. (2009). Lobbying
and policy change: Who wins, who loses, and why. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press.
Block, F. (1987). Revising state theory. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1998). The state nobility. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Brady, D. (2010). Rich democracies, poor people: How politics explain poverty. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Burstein, P. (2014). American public opinion, advocacy, and policy in Congress. New York,
NY: Cambridge University Press.
Clawson, D., Neustadtl, A., & Weller, M. (1998). Dollars and votes: How business campaign contributions subvert democracy. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Dahl, R. (1998). On democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Domhoff, G. W. (2010). Who rules America? New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Franklin, M. (2004). Voter turnout and the dynamics of electoral competition in established
democracies since 1945. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Galbraith, J. (1952). American capitalism: The theory of countervailing power. Boston, MA:
Houghton Mifflin.
Garfinkel, I., Smeeding, T., & Rainwater, L. (2010). Wealth and the welfare state. New
York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Garrett, G. (1998). Partisan politics in the global economy. New York, NY: Cambridge
University Press.

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Gilens, M. (2012). Affluence and influence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gough, I., & Therborn, G. (2010). The global future of welfare states. In F. Castles,
S. Leibfried, J. Lewis, H. Obinger & C. Pierson (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the
welfare state (pp. 703–720). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Hacker, J., & Pierson, P. (2010). Winner-take-all politics. New York, NY: Simon and
Shuster.
Hacker, J., & Pierson, P. (2005). Off-center: The republican revolution and the erosion of
American democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hayes, C. (2010). Twilight of the elites. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books.
Iversen, T. (2010). Democracy and capitalism. In F. Castles, S. Leibfried, J. Lewis, H.
Obinger & C. Pierson (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the welfare state (pp. 183–195).
New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Kahn, S. (2009). Privilege. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Kelly, N. (2009). The politics of income inequality. New York, NY: Cambridge University
Press.
Korpi, W. (1983). The democratic class struggle. London, England: Routledge & Kegan
Paul.
Leighley, J., & Nagler, J. (2013). Who votes now?: Demographics, issues, inequality, and
turnout in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lijphart, A. (1997). Unequal participation: Democracy’s unresolved dilemma. American Political Science Review, 91, 1–14.
Lindblom, C. (1977). Politics and markets. New York, NY: Basic Books.
Lipset, S. M. (1981 [1960]). Political man (Expanded ed.). Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
McCarty, N., Poole, K., & Rosenthal, H. (2006). Polarized America: The dance of ideology
and unequal riches. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
McKay, A. (2012). Buying policy? The effects of lobbyists’ resources on their policy
success. Political Research Quarterly, 65, 908–23.
Michels, R. (1966 [1911]). Political parties: A sociological study of the oligarchic tendencies
in modern democracy. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press.
Mills, C. W. (1956). The power elite. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Mizruchi, M. (2013). The fracturing of the American corporate elite. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Offe, C. (1985). Disorganized capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Pareto, V. (1968 [1901]). The rise and fall of the elites: An application of theoretical sociology.
Totowa, NJ: Bedminster Press.
Pierson, P. (Ed.) (2001). The new politics of the welfare state. Oxford, England: Oxford
University Press.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Pontusson, J. (2005). Inequality and prosperity: Social Europe versus liberal America.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Przeworski, A., & Wallerstein, M. (1988). Structural dependence of the state on capital. American Political Science Review, 82, 11–29.

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Ross, M. (2006). Is democracy good for the poor? American Journal of Political Science,
50, 860–74.
Scholzman, K., Verba, S., & Brady, H. (2012). The unheavenly chorus: Unequal political
voice and the broken promise of American democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Shapiro, I. (2002). Why the poor don’t soak the rich: Notes on democracy and distribution. Daedalus, 130, 118–28.
Silver, B. (2003). Forces of labor. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Soskice, D., & Hall, P. (Eds.) (2001). Varieties of capitalism. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
Streeck, W. (2012). Buying time: The delayed crisis of democratic capitalism. London, England: Verso.
Swank, D. (2006). Tax policy in an era of internationalization: Explaining the spread
of neoliberalism. International Organization, 60, 847–882.
Swank, D. (2010). Globalization. In F. Castles, S. Leibfried, J. Lewis, H. Obinger & C.
Pierson (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the welfare state (pp. 318–330). New York, NY:
Oxford University Press.
Therborn, G. (2008). From marxism to post-marxism? London, England: Verso.
Useem, M. (1984). The inner circle: Large corporations and the rise of business political
activity in the U.S. and U.K. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Wallerstein, M., & Western, B. (2000). Unions in decline? What has changed and why.
Annual Review of Political Science, 3, 355–77.
Winters, J. (2011). Oligarchy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Zweigenhaft, R., & Domhoff, G. W. (2006). Diversity in the power elite: How it happened,
why it matters. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

FURTHER READING
Howard, C. (2008). The welfare state nobody knows. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Huber, E., & Stephens, J. (2001). Development and crisis of the welfare state: Parties and
policies in global markets. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Iversen, T., & Cusack, T. (2000). The causes of welfare state expansion: Deindustrialization or globalization? World Politics, 52, 313–349.
Krippner, G. (2010). Capitalizing on crisis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pierson, P., & Skocpol, T. (Eds.) (2007). The transformation of American politics: Activist
government and the rise of conservatism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rosenfeld, J. (2014). What unions no longer do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.

JEFF MANZA SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Jeff Manza is Professor of Sociology at New York University (http://
sociology.as.nyu.edu/object/JeffManza). His teaching and research interests lay at the intersection of inequality, political sociology, and public

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policy. His research has examined how different types of social identities
and inequalities influence political processes such as voting behavior,
partisanship, and public opinion (at both the macro and micro levels). He is
the coauthor of Whose Rights?: Counterterrorism and the Dark Side of American
Public Opinion (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2013); Why Welfare States
Persist (University of Chicago Press, 2007); Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2006); and Social
Cleavages and Political Change (Oxford University Press, 1999). He is currently
completing a book (with Clem Brooks) on the surprising right-turn of the
American public in the face of the Great Recession.
RELATED ESSAYS
Understanding American Political Conservatism (Political Science), Joel D.
Aberbach
Party Organizations’ Electioneering Arms Race (Political Science), John H.
Aldrich and Jeffrey D. Grynaviski
The Role of Data in Research and Policy (Sociology), Barbara A. Anderson
A Social Psychological Approach to Racializing Wealth Inequality (Sociology), Joey Brown
Political Ideologies (Political Science), Edward G. Carmines and Nicholas J.
D’Amico
Elites (Sociology), Johan S. G. Chu and Mark S. Mizruchi
Global Income Inequality (Sociology), Glenn Firebaugh
Distributive Politics: Federal Outlays (Political Science), Sanford C. Gordon
and Woo Chang Kang
The Future of Employment, Wages, and Technological Change (Economics),
Michael J. Handel
Racial Disenfranchisement (Political Science), Vincent L. Hutchings and
Davin L. Phoenix
Women Running for Office (Political Science), Jennifer L. Lawless
Intergenerational Mobility: A Cross-National Comparison (Economics),
Bhashkar Mazumder
Gender and Women’s Influence in Public Settings (Political Science), Tali
Mendelberg et al.
Money in Politics (Political Science), Jeffrey Milyo
Politics of Immigration Policy (Political Science), Jeannette Money
Why Do Governments Abuse Human Rights? (Political Science), Will H.
Moore and Ryan M. Welch
Health and Social Inequality (Sociology), Bernice A. Pescosolido
The Politics of Disaster Relief (Political Science), Alexander J. Oliver and
Andrew Reeves

Political Inequality

17

Electoral Authoritarianism (Political Science), Andreas Schedler
Family Income Composition (Economics), Kristin E. Smith
Impact of Limited Education on Employment Prospects in Advanced
Economies (Sociology), Heike Solga
The Future of Class Analyses in American Politics (Political Science), Jeffrey
M. Stonecash
Does the 1 Person 1 Vote Principle Apply? (Political Science), Ian R. Turner
et al.
Public Opinion, The 1%, and Income Redistribution (Sociology), David L.
Weakliem
Gender and Work (Sociology), Christine L. Williams and Megan Tobias Neely



Political Inequality
JEFF MANZA

Abstract
In the classical model of democracy, governments are responsive to the mass public,
making public policies favored by a majority of citizens while respecting the rights of
minorities. In the real world, of course, no political system, democratic or otherwise,
has ever fully realized this principle of political equality. The focus of this essay is an
examination of research on how economic inequalities impact democratic politics.
The question has become especially pressing as economic inequality has risen, in
some countries quite dramatically, in recent decades. Political inequality may refer
to either differential inputs into policymaking processes, in which some actors have
more influence than others, or it can refer to policy outputs, in particular those which
encourage or sustain income and wealth inequality. In this essay, I review four
contemporary theories of political inequality (elite and oligarchic models, power
resources theories, globalization models, and participatory inequality models). Each
throws light on some aspects of political inequality, but none provides a completely
satisfactory account. I conclude with some suggestions for future directions for
research.

INTRODUCTION
Modern democratic political systems claim legitimacy by asserting that all
citizens have equal opportunities to shape the composition of their elected
governments and the resulting public policies. In the classical model of
democracy, governments are responsive to the mass public, making public
policies favored by a majority of citizens while respecting the rights of
minorities. In the real world, of course, no political system, democratic or
otherwise, has ever fully realized this principle of political equality (Dahl,
1998). However, in recent decades, rising income and wealth inequalities,
combined with the seeming inability of democratic governments to promote
a greater sharing of the fruits of economic growth, has prompted renewed
interest in the question of how economic inequalities impact political systems. The potential for redistribution through democratic political systems
in capitalist societies, where all citizens have the right to vote, is an issue that
has exercised social science imaginations since the dawn of mass democracy.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

150 years on, it is clear that this scenario has not yet come to pass, and
there are few signs suggesting the future might be different or even that the
introduction of democracy necessarily leads to redistribution (Ross, 2006).
The inevitable puzzle, as Shapiro (2002) pithily puts it, is “why don’t the
[vastly more numerous] poor soak the rich?”
If we take the long view, there is little doubt that democratic political systems have been associated with redistribution via the adoption of various
social welfare policies and welfare state institutions, which have become universal and enduringly popular. The rise of the welfare state since the late
nineteenth century has unquestionably enhanced economic opportunity and
raised living standards across the entire population and across the life course
(Garfinkel, Smeeding, & Rainwater, 2010). However, it now appears to most
commentators that we have reached the end of the “golden age” of welfare
state expansion (Pierson, 2001; Streeck, 2012). The political choices that have
been made in the past couple of decades have allowed inequality to surge.
In the longer run of history, the relatively egalitarian twentieth century (and
the innovations in tax and transfer systems adopted, especially in the decades
after World War II) may prove to be the exception to the long-run bias of capitalism toward inegalitarian outcomes (Piketty, 2014). And if so, the sources
of inequality in democratic political systems are likely to provide one key to
understanding this shift. (One could, of course, make similar claims about
authoritarian capitalist societies, but that is not the target of this essay.)
My focus is to get at these larger questions with a somewhat narrower
agenda: what have we learned about are the mechanisms through which
economic inequality impacts democratic politics, and what should future
research address more thoroughly? Political inequality can take one of two
different forms: It may refer to either differential inputs into policymaking
processes, in which some actors have more influence than others, or it can
refer to policy outputs, in particular those which encourage or sustain income
and wealth inequality. It is certainly not obvious that political inequality
should be common feature of democratic political systems. In the classical
pluralist vision of democracy, for example, the resources of affluent actors
in democratic systems can be offset by mobilization of citizens and groups
“from below”; in Galbraith’s (1952) famous formulation, democratic political
systems can be relatively egalitarian and produce redistributive outcomes so
long as ordinary citizens have sufficient “countervailing power” to contest
economic and political elites. Countervailing power is most likely to be
produced by strong unions, social movements from below, or electorally
competitive left (or social democratic) political parties advancing redistributive policy programs. However, in an era of nearly universal union decline
(Silver, 2003; Wallerstein & Western, 2000) and the gradual retreat of social
democratic parties toward less redistributive positions (Therborn, 2008),

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the weakening of countervailing power now appears to be a central fact of
contemporary democratic capitalism.
FOUNDATIONS
The claim that entrenched biases toward favoring certain kinds of actors
and interests over others arises from some very basic elements of capitalist
democracy. No elected government (subject to periodic reevaluation by its
citizens) can afford to allow a severe economic contraction brought on by
declining business investment if it hopes to remain electorally competitive
(Block, 1987; Lindblom, 1977). Maintaining conditions favorable to investment thus provides a kind of structural power available to the very largest
of individual economic actors, and more generally to politically organized
peak business associations. Block (1987, Chapter 4) nicely captures this
idea with the notion of “business confidence” as the mechanism of structural power that all democratically elected governments must pay some
heed to.
Further, there are easily demonstrable disparities in the class power of different groups, with corporate interests in particular having advantages not
shared by poor people or a disorganized working class. Offe and Wisenthal
(Offe, 1985, Chapter 7) offered one elegant formulation of this idea, arguing
that while the working class had to organize large and often diffuse groups
into unions or social movements, business interests could often exert power
on governments with the mere threat of disinvestment or departure. A single large employer acting on its own has leverage that other groups can only
acquire with high levels of organization.
Taken together, the business confidence and power disparities inherent
to contemporary capitalism create structural conditions for a bias toward
protecting and promoting the interests of economic elites and firms over
everyone else. However, this “structural power” hypothesis has not proved
easy to rigorously test. Classical examples of democratically elected left
governments with an explicitly socialist policy agenda that would unquestionably threaten business confidence are few and far between. Where they
have appeared (e.g., the experience of the French socialists led by President
Francois Mitterand after 1981, the Chilean government under Salvador
Allende in the early 1970s, or the Swedish social democrats in the late 1970s
when the Party’s radical Meidner Plan to promote worker ownership of private firms was shelved once in office) exemplify some of the rapid pressures
that can arise to abandon their program in favor of moderation. However,
systematic analyses with cross-national data are difficult; Przeworski and
Wallerstein (1988) developed one such examination, finding little support
for the structural power hypothesis.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

Aside from being pitched a high level of abstraction, another key problem
for the structural power hypothesis is to account for the fact that every rich
democracy has adopted welfare state initiatives in the face of widespread
opposition by economic elites. In no case have high marginal tax rates on
individual earners—or indeed, any income or corporate taxes at all!—been
adopted without significant ferocious opposition. Similarly, taxes on business profits were, and remain, bitterly contested. Pro-union legislation,
which has enhanced the ability of unions to organize workers, carry out
strikes, and promote collective bargaining over employment terms, has similarly been resisted (at least in its early stages); however, in most countries,
measures to assist union organizing were eventually adopted. Finally, redistributive social programs—most notably national health insurance schemes
and universal pensions—have often been unpopular with putatively power
economic interests but steadily expanded throughout most of the twentieth
century.
In view of such observations and examples, it would be folly to assume
that democratic political systems in capitalist societies cannot promote redistribution, or that the structural power of capital precludes it. However, this
still leaves a key puzzle: In the early decades of the twenty-first century,
democratic governments appear mostly unable to provide continuing benefits and wage growth to the median voter, whereas in most countries, the
very highest earners are seeing their share of income and wealth grow handsomely. Further, social programs benefitting either the median voter or the
poor appear squeezed in a variety of ways, between rising cost pressures
from below and an inability of national governments to increase revenue to
pay for them (Gough & Therborn, 2010). Understanding these patterns suggests the need for a theory of political inequality. I explore leading theoretical
models in the following section.
CONTEMPORARY THEORY AND RESEARCH
ELITE AND OLIGARCHIC THEORIES
One classical model of political inequality hypothesized that a small handful
of actors eventually come to dominate all political systems, democratic
or authoritarian (Michels, 1966 [1911]; Pareto, 1968 [1901]). In the modern
reformulation of elite theory, beginning with Mills (1956), political elites
are viewed as being drawn from a narrow set of institutions with similar
social backgrounds and networks, and they will tend to use political power
to serve their own ends. Elites dominate political offices via selection
mechanisms they control (i.e., who gets into the elite, or who is eligible to
be considered for key appointments in policymaking offices) and by having

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5

disproportionate influence over the outputs of policymaking processes
(Domhoff, 2010, Chapter 3). Elites typically hail from a narrow range of
educational institutions, with schools increasingly displacing families as
the locus of selection (Bourdieu, 1998; Kahn, 2009). Once selected into
elite institutions, individual aspirants must exhibit appropriate levels of
conformity and performance to be advanced up the ranks. Elite status is not
necessarily linked to a particular ideology, political partisanship, or wealth
(elites can have a range of views on political issues, can be found in all major
political parties, and may or may not have personal or familial wealth).
However, because of selection and shared training, elites will tend to share
common views, or at least collectively maintain a narrow range of opinions
that will differ from the rest of the public.
In recent decades, as meritocracy as become an increasingly common
foundation for elite selection (Hayes, 2010), diversity in terms of sociodemographic background is increased (e.g., women and members from minority
group backgrounds have become more common) (see Kahn, 2009; Zweigenhaft & Domhoff, 2006). However, this alone does not necessarily mean that
elite cohesion is declining; as long as the experience of socialization and
selection remain robust. However, whether the elite can plausibly be said
to have a set of common interests is more complicated. From Mills (1956)
onward, there has been a tendency to identify the elite as all of those holding
positions of power in important institutions. This wide-ranging view makes
it difficult to specify the basis on which elites will have common interests.
However, even if we limit the conception to the corporate elite, the problem
is not solved. It is not difficult to show that conflicts within the corporate
community are rampant (Mizruchi, 2013, pp. 15–17). Different firms and
industries are inevitably going to favor different public policies, and perhaps
only at the very top or under certain unique historical contexts is unity
possible (Mizruchi, 2013; Useem, 1984).
In a wide-ranging recent work, Jeffrey Winters (2011) proposes an alternative to elite theory as the foundation for political inequality by focusing more
narrowly on the ways in which the largest wealth holders use political means
to protect their assets from forfeiture. No matter how it is drawn, the entire
“elite” will not have a common interest in protecting large fortunes, as only a
minority of their members will control such fortunes (2011, p. 26ff). Further,
at least in democratic societies, political elites may well have motivations
to promote popular policies, including redistributive ones, which enhance
their electability (in this way, elite theory elides key contrasts between social
democratic and conservative elites). By contrast, Winters argues that large
wealth holders in all societies share a single decisive common interest in the
protection of their fortunes. This motivates them to work within the institutional and political constraints of the context they are living to try to achieve

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

it. These individuals whom Winters refers to as oligarchs are defined by the
possession of sufficient amounts of wealth to engage in what he calls income
defense.
In Winters’ comparative-historical framework, oligarchy can take a wide
variety of forms in different society, depending on whether the principle
threat to wealth comes is competition from other oligarchs, threats to their
wealth holdings from governments (principally in the form of taxation), or
from citizens from below (especially if there is no legal framework capable
of securing protection of private property). In contemporary democracies,
where private property rights are well secured by rule of law, the principle threat to oligarchs is exposure to taxation. Tax avoidance is assisted by
the endless variety of strategies created by an “income defense industry”
that specializes in reducing tax exposure and operates on an increasingly
global scale (Winters, 2011, Chapter 5). Oligarchs are motivated to use political means to limit marginal income tax rates, estate taxes, and promote a
stealthy politics in which wealth and income can be protected through loopholes and exemptions (most notably through overseas storage of wealth subject to minimal or no taxation).
Winters produces some startling historical evidence in favor of the basic
insights of the oligarchy model as a key to understanding political inequality around the world and over time. For example, he shows that the gap
between the richest 1% and the bottom 20% is likely far greater in contemporary societies like the United States (or even Sweden) than the gaps between
the wealthiest 1% and lower strata, even in some cases slaves, in ancient
Greece and Rome. The inability of social democratic countries in Northern
Europe to rein in the wealthiest of families has allowed for the maintenance of
wealth and even permitted the very top in recent years to take off. Finally, the
increasing prominence of the financial sector in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries, both for governments seeking to encourage or maintain growth and for high net-wealth individuals, creates the perfect synergy
for both wealth and income defense (cf. Piketty, 2014).
In spite of its insights, the oligarchy model does not provide much leverage
over the full range of policy inputs and outputs that shape the distribution
of income and wealth across the population. There is also an open question
as to how and why the most important policy shifts favoring oligarchs—first
the rise, then the decline in high marginal rates on top income earners, and
rise and decline of corporate income taxes as well—has happened in virtually
all rich democracies since the 1960s. In the immediate post-World War II era,
marginal tax rates on the highest earning households approached or in some
cases exceeded 90% in many countries. Today, virtually no affluent country
has a marginal income tax rate on top earners above 50%, and in some cases,
effective tax rates are substantially lower. Further, the startling decline in the

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7

rates—and in a number of countries, the outright elimination—of estate taxes
provides another intriguing puzzle: Why would working and middle-class
voters allow such reforms to proceed when they themselves have virtually
no chance of benefitting from them? Oligarchs may have disproportionate
power, but even on key questions of importance to oligarchs other actors
play important roles.
POWER RESOURCES
If the elite and oligarchic models cannot tell us much about how distributive politics for the bottom 99% of the population, we need to turn to
other models for an account of why the variation in redistribution policy
outputs between, say, Norway and the United States are as wide as they
are. The dominant political sociological model for studying comparative
political inequality in recent decades has been what is loosely known as
the power resources approach (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Korpi, 1983). This
approach starts from the assumption that unequal economic relationships,
particularly as exemplified in the class structure, facilitate the formation of
organized groups (or classes, in the Marxian-inspired terminology of early
power resources theory) and ultimately political parties with distinct and
competing interests. Within capitalist democracies, elections—what Korpi
(1983) once influentially called the democratic class struggle—is thus a central
mechanism for political redistribution. However, because the political
capacities of core classes such as industrial owners, farmers, and manual
workers vary over time, as their size and organizational capacity shifts, the
subsequent development of welfare states reflects the institutionalization of
different patterns of class alliance. For instance, when a highly organized
working class is successfully allied with farmers, this tends to facilitate the
emergence of welfare states with extensive social provisions, as in the case
of Sweden. There, universal social security programs were implemented in
conjunction with price subsidies for farmers. By contrast, when the working
class has high levels of regional or racial/ethnic fragmentation that inhibit
class alliances, the interests of employers will figure more centrally in regime
development, as in the case of the United States (Alesina & Glaser, 2004;
Esping-Andersen, 1990). In such cases, social spending and the provision of
government services are likely considerably more restricted.
One of the strengths of the power resources model is that it can account for
variability of economic and political inequalities, depending on the organizational capacity of key social groups. Analysts have postulated the existence
of different types of welfare state “regimes,” in which distinct combinations
of social groups and political parties can be found. In the most common such
typology, associated with the work of Esping-Andersen (1990), there are three

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ideal types: social democracies (typically those of Northern Europe), Christian democracies (common in Continental Europe), and liberal democracies
(primarily in the Anglo-American countries). In each case, a combination of
similar political forces and political institutions give rise to similar kinds of
policy outputs. The “three worlds” model has been vigorously tested over
the years, with different analysts deriving different clusters depending on
the question and dataset under investigation, but generally finding evidence
supporting the utility of the regime clusters idea as a way of sorting through
cross-national variation (cf. Arts & Gelissen, 2010). Alternative formulations
of the distinctive institutional systems can be found in the “varieties of capitalism” literature (Pontusson, 2005; Soskice & Hall, 2001).
Despite its leverage over comparative outcomes, questions about the
power resources model abound. Perhaps most importantly, in an era where
unions and social democratic parties are declining or retreating from historic
commitments, redistributive social spending in many countries has persisted at high levels (albeit not enough to reverse rising income inequality).
This is a puzzle for power resources theory because the model predicts
social spending to decline. An additional problem is that it assumes a unidimensional form of political alignment, from left to right organized along
preferences for redistribution, which impacts political alignment (Iversen,
2010, pp. 187–188). Yet in many ways, real-world political contests are not
structured that way. Multiple political cleavages, as Lipset [1981 (1961)]
postulated many years ago, can undermine the expression of class politics, as
when working-class voters prefer a right-wing anti-immigrant party, or the
party opposed to affirmative action, or the party advocating “traditional”
family values. Further confused divisions arise when middle-class voters are
drawn to left parties advocating gender equality, tolerance and social rights
for minorities, or stronger environmentalist policies. Such noneconomic
motivations have the potential to break up class-based alignments, and
where especially strong can undermine support for more equality.
THE GLOBALIZATION HYPOTHESIS
A prominent focus of much social science work on the sources of rising political inequality in the modern world has centered on globalization, or more
specifically how increased flows (of trade, people, and investment) across
borders have reduced the capacity of governments to adopt or maintain
policies that would limit economic inequalities. Globalization arguments
have been marshaled to anticipate negative trends in contemporary welfare
state development and, by proxy, political inequality. Here, the growing
international mobility of capital is viewed as inducing “race to the bottom”:
that is, pressures on governments seeking to maintain competitiveness

Political Inequality

9

and avoid disinvestment lead governments to avoid adopting tax and
transfer programs that will discourage investment. In limiting the policy
options available to national governments, economic globalization provides
incentive for policymakers to turn away from traditional forms of social
provision in favor of growth politics that favor capital accumulation.
Using established measures of welfare state output (e.g., as a percentage
of GDP), globalization’s core dimensions can at best be said to have had a
modest, at times positive, influence (Brady, 2010; Iversen, 2010). The impact
of globalization on the ability of governments to raise tax revenues has similarly been shown to be quite limited or nonexistent, even if governments
have tended to move toward more market-conforming patterns of taxation
(e.g., lowering the highest marginal rates, and reducing or eliminating direct
corporate taxation in favor of broader based taxation such as consumption
taxes; see Swank, 2006).
This emerging consensus about the limited impact of globalization
(see Swank, 2010) fits quite well with seminal early commentaries on
issues of globalization and national sovereignty. For example, individual
nation-states, particularly small polities whose economies have always
depended on high levels of trade and participation in the world economy,
have adjusted continuously in the postwar era to anticipate the uncertainties
associated with globalization rather than merely being swallowed by them
(Garrett, 1998; Soskice & Hall, 2001). Further, many social policies aimed
at reducing poverty and inequality, such as jobs training programs and
disability services, can actually enhance economic productivity and global
competitiveness. Social policy innovations within many European nations
can be viewed as a bulwark against deindustrialization and related economic
threats arising from globalization (Iversen, 2010). In short, recent patterns of
economic globalization thus appear quite compatible with the maintenance
of contemporary welfare states, and need not increase political inequality.
PARTICIPATORY INEQUALITIES: POLITICAL INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS
If the broadest of claims about globalization’s impacts appear overstated,
there at least one way that it is plausibly linked to rising political inequality: by enhancing the divide between those who have full access to politicians
and policymakers, and those whose rights or powers are limited in some way.
These participatory inequalities, as we might call them, have both domestic
and international roots. The seemingly simple right to vote—foundation for
democratic equality—is no longer so simple when growing proportions of
national populations are immigrants (and thereby ineligible to participate).
In the powerful analysis of McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal (2006) on the US

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

case, rising immigration (in first the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and then again since the 1970s) is associated with both rising economic
inequality and political polarization (with the latter seen as reinforcing trends
toward disenfranchisement and making redistributive policies more difficult). McCarty et al. view that the critical mechanism of immigration’s impact
is political disenfranchisement. Because immigrants are disproportionately
located at the lower rungs of the labor market, as they grow in size the median
voter shifts upward while the bottom groups have artificially reduced political power.
Other types of participatory inequalities have been proposed. A classical
question regarding political inequality concerns group differences in voter
turnout; if well-resourced groups participate in elections at higher levels than
everyone else, a type of de facto inequality emerges even if the right to vote
is universal (Lijphart, 1997). One key conclusion in the literature is that when
overall turnout rates are very high, there are not likely to be a meaningful skew among those who participate. However, as turnout rates drop—a
phenomenon that is occurring in many countries, especially among younger
voters (Franklin, 2004)—the potential for participatory disparities grows. In
countries where turnout rates have historically been low, such as the United
States, it is very likely that policy outcomes have been impacted in favor of
higher resourced groups because of turnout skews (Leighley & Nagler, 2013).
Participation disparities go well beyond voting to include many other ways
in which citizens seek to influence politicians: writing letters or contacting
politicians directly, participating in civic groups, donating money to political causes, and so forth (Scholzman, Verba, & Brady, 2012). The further away
from the simplest political acts we look, the more likely that higher resourced
individuals are going to be participating at much greater rates.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
A central challenge for contemporary research on political inequality has
been to persuasively demonstrate the causal linkages between economic
and political inequalities. The claim that unequal political inputs—or policy
outputs—are, in fact, characteristic of modern political systems has not
proved a simple or straightforward proposition. To go further, researchers
will need to move beyond broad theoretical models that we have at present,
to get “inside” the centers of decision-making, and also to pay more attention to the microfoundations of citizens’ policy attitudes as an adjunct to
understanding why inequality is rising without strong pushback from below.
To give a brief flavor of these challenges, my discussion in this section will
consider in a bit more detail some of the research on the country where rising
economic inequality has been most rapid, and where the political system is

Political Inequality

11

widely thought to be the most open to elite influence: the United States. It is
hard to imagine a national context that would be more likely to have a political system characterized by inequality than the United States. Yet even here
the mechanics of political inequality have proved difficult to specify in adequate detail. There are no shortage of leading contenders that social scientists
have explored in recent years, and I will consider three: (i) The extraordinary
amount of money donated to candidates running for office, which is vastly
higher than in all other democratic countries and has grown steadily over the
past four decades with growing contributions from both affluent individuals
and corporate political action committees; (ii) The system of interest group
lobbying of legislators and regulators, again unique in American politics in
terms of the amount of expenditures devoted and the growth over time in
lobbying activities; (iii) The limits of a two-party system, in which there is no
traditionally social democratic party and one in which party polarization has
increased in recent decades.
None of these standard explanations has provided a firm and robust set of
conclusions, and each remains in need of further explication to understand.
Let us start with political money. American politics have always been awash
with cash, as First Amendment principles have equated “free speech” with
the right to invest in politics and permitted Congress relatively little scope
for setting limits on political investment. Therefore, how and in what ways
might the increased flow political money in recent decades matter? Theories
of “investor” influence on the parties and legislation have proved difficult
to definitively test and validate. The dominant thrust of the recent literature,
however, strongly suggests that the impact of money is modest at best (for
an authoritative review, see Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, & Snyder, 2003).
In particular, it is never the case that the amount of money coming from any
one donor is of sufficient magnitude to insure a legislator’s vote, especially
as the totals being raised have grown so dramatically. Other factors—party
membership, legislator’s ideology and beliefs, public opinion (perceived or
actual), or strategic calculations about how a vote will impact future career
prospects—have greater measurable impact on legislative behavior in the
most serious research on the topic. This does not mean that large political
donations are irrelevant; they can provide the donor with a kind of insider
access to elected officials that enable donors to press their case or perhaps
gain tax breaks or exemptions inserted into legislation that is largely hidden
from the public view (Clawson, Neustadtl, & Weller, 1998). However, to see
how such access works, social scientists will have to develop new sorts of
data and evidence than we have at the present time.
The system of interest group lobbying has similarly failed to show conclusive evidence that in spite of the mammoth sums spent by corporations, business associations, professional associations, unions, and others, the direction

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of policy is skewed in one direction or the other. The most comprehensive
and systematic recent examination (Baumgartner, Berry, Hojnacki, Kimball,
& Leech, 2009) finds that well-funded corporate lobbies do not prevail any
more often than poorly citizens groups, and perhaps more importantly it is
simply very difficult for any group to shift (or re-frame) the status quo no
matter how much they spend attempting to do so. Other scholarship has
reached similar conclusions (Burstein, 2014; Gilens, 2012, Chapter 5; McKay,
2012). Political lobbying is perhaps better viewed as an arms race—given its
pervasiveness, few groups will feel comfortable not participating, so everyone does it, but the impacts are mixed, hard to pin down, and in general
cannot systematically explain political inequality.
The party system is the third leg of the trio of factors most often pointed to
account for political inequality in America. In particular, changes in the two
major parties since the 1970s appear plausibly linked to policy outputs favoring economic elites, but here again some caution in reaching firm conclusions
is warranted. The Republican Party has unquestionably moved significantly
to the right in recent decades (cf. McCarty et al., 2006), developing and
maintaining an anti-tax, anti-government agenda, and enforcing discipline
on members in a unique way for an American party (cf. Hacker & Pierson,
2005, 2010; Orenstein and Mann, 2011). When in control of both the White
House and Congress, the Party has sponsored major tax reductions and more
recently pressed for substantial reductions in the size and scope of government responsibility. Time-series analyses suggest that Republican presidents
since the 1950s have allowed inequality to grow faster than Democratic
Presidents (Bartels, 2008; Kelly, 2009). Yet several questions remain in need of
further research before the party-centered account could prove adequate. For
example, many key policy initiatives adopted or promoted by Republican
politicians appear to have had broad public support (cf. Gilens, 2012, Chapter
6, noting that in his dataset, the most responsive Presidency since the 1960s
was that of George W. Bush). To what extent were these policies the result of
party activism, or were they more simply the result of underlying views of
the mass public that made it easy to adopt (as Bartels, 2008 has suggested)?
CONCLUSION
Democracy as a political system promises equality of participation and
influence to everyone. Political inequality is not necessarily inevitable, but
the experience of the past couple of decades suggests that democratic political systems may struggle to contain rising income and wealth inequality in
the twenty-first century, and perhaps even more strongly rising economic
inequality has the potential to increase political inequality. There are a
variety of contemporary theoretical models that point to various factors to

Political Inequality

13

account for how and why political inequality arises, or when it is muted. No
one of these models, however, appears to provide a bulletproof explanation.
Perhaps more pressingly, future research needs to get inside capitalist
democracy more fully than it has. Much of the current theorizing is at a
macro level of abstraction that would benefit from deeper exploration of
how policy inputs and outputs are related. To sharpen this point, this essay
concluded with a discussion of the dilemmas and difficulties of explaining
political inequality in the United States, seemingly the easiest case. Certainly,
we can be sure that pressure on social scientists to account for the political
sources of economic inequality is likely to grow in the future.
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Block, F. (1987). Revising state theory. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Bourdieu, P. (1998). The state nobility. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Brady, D. (2010). Rich democracies, poor people: How politics explain poverty. New York,
NY: Oxford University Press.
Burstein, P. (2014). American public opinion, advocacy, and policy in Congress. New York,
NY: Cambridge University Press.
Clawson, D., Neustadtl, A., & Weller, M. (1998). Dollars and votes: How business campaign contributions subvert democracy. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Dahl, R. (1998). On democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
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Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). The three worlds of welfare capitalism. Princeton, NJ:
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Franklin, M. (2004). Voter turnout and the dynamics of electoral competition in established
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Garfinkel, I., Smeeding, T., & Rainwater, L. (2010). Wealth and the welfare state. New
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Garrett, G. (1998). Partisan politics in the global economy. New York, NY: Cambridge
University Press.

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Gilens, M. (2012). Affluence and influence. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gough, I., & Therborn, G. (2010). The global future of welfare states. In F. Castles,
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Hacker, J., & Pierson, P. (2010). Winner-take-all politics. New York, NY: Simon and
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Hacker, J., & Pierson, P. (2005). Off-center: The republican revolution and the erosion of
American democracy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Hayes, C. (2010). Twilight of the elites. New York, NY: Metropolitan Books.
Iversen, T. (2010). Democracy and capitalism. In F. Castles, S. Leibfried, J. Lewis, H.
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McCarty, N., Poole, K., & Rosenthal, H. (2006). Polarized America: The dance of ideology
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Pierson, P. (Ed.) (2001). The new politics of the welfare state. Oxford, England: Oxford
University Press.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
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Pontusson, J. (2005). Inequality and prosperity: Social Europe versus liberal America.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Przeworski, A., & Wallerstein, M. (1988). Structural dependence of the state on capital. American Political Science Review, 82, 11–29.

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Ross, M. (2006). Is democracy good for the poor? American Journal of Political Science,
50, 860–74.
Scholzman, K., Verba, S., & Brady, H. (2012). The unheavenly chorus: Unequal political
voice and the broken promise of American democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Shapiro, I. (2002). Why the poor don’t soak the rich: Notes on democracy and distribution. Daedalus, 130, 118–28.
Silver, B. (2003). Forces of labor. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Soskice, D., & Hall, P. (Eds.) (2001). Varieties of capitalism. New York, NY: Oxford
University Press.
Streeck, W. (2012). Buying time: The delayed crisis of democratic capitalism. London, England: Verso.
Swank, D. (2006). Tax policy in an era of internationalization: Explaining the spread
of neoliberalism. International Organization, 60, 847–882.
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Pierson (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the welfare state (pp. 318–330). New York, NY:
Oxford University Press.
Therborn, G. (2008). From marxism to post-marxism? London, England: Verso.
Useem, M. (1984). The inner circle: Large corporations and the rise of business political
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Wallerstein, M., & Western, B. (2000). Unions in decline? What has changed and why.
Annual Review of Political Science, 3, 355–77.
Winters, J. (2011). Oligarchy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Zweigenhaft, R., & Domhoff, G. W. (2006). Diversity in the power elite: How it happened,
why it matters. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

FURTHER READING
Howard, C. (2008). The welfare state nobody knows. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Huber, E., & Stephens, J. (2001). Development and crisis of the welfare state: Parties and
policies in global markets. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Iversen, T., & Cusack, T. (2000). The causes of welfare state expansion: Deindustrialization or globalization? World Politics, 52, 313–349.
Krippner, G. (2010). Capitalizing on crisis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pierson, P., & Skocpol, T. (Eds.) (2007). The transformation of American politics: Activist
government and the rise of conservatism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rosenfeld, J. (2014). What unions no longer do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.

JEFF MANZA SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Jeff Manza is Professor of Sociology at New York University (http://
sociology.as.nyu.edu/object/JeffManza). His teaching and research interests lay at the intersection of inequality, political sociology, and public

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policy. His research has examined how different types of social identities
and inequalities influence political processes such as voting behavior,
partisanship, and public opinion (at both the macro and micro levels). He is
the coauthor of Whose Rights?: Counterterrorism and the Dark Side of American
Public Opinion (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2013); Why Welfare States
Persist (University of Chicago Press, 2007); Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2006); and Social
Cleavages and Political Change (Oxford University Press, 1999). He is currently
completing a book (with Clem Brooks) on the surprising right-turn of the
American public in the face of the Great Recession.
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Political Inequality

17

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Political Inequality
JEFF MANZA

Abstract
In the classical model of democracy, governments are responsive to the mass public,
making public policies favored by a majority of citizens while respecting the rights of
minorities. In the real world, of course, no political system, democratic or otherwise,
has ever fully realized this principle of political equality. The focus of this essay is an
examination of research on how economic inequalities impact democratic politics.
The question has become especially pressing as economic inequality has risen, in
some countries quite dramatically, in recent decades. Political inequality may refer
to either differential inputs into policymaking processes, in which some actors have
more influence than others, or it can refer to policy outputs, in particular those which
encourage or sustain income and wealth inequality. In this essay, I review four
contemporary theories of political inequality (elite and oligarchic models, power
resources theories, globalization models, and participatory inequality models). Each
throws light on some aspects of political inequality, but none provides a completely
satisfactory account. I conclude with some suggestions for future directions for
research.

INTRODUCTION
Modern democratic political systems claim legitimacy by asserting that all
citizens have equal opportunities to shape the composition of their elected
governments and the resulting public policies. In the classical model of
democracy, governments are responsive to the mass public, making public
policies favored by a majority of citizens while respecting the rights of
minorities. In the real world, of course, no political system, democratic or
otherwise, has ever fully realized this principle of political equality (Dahl,
1998). However, in recent decades, rising income and wealth inequalities,
combined with the seeming inability of democratic governments to promote
a greater sharing of the fruits of economic growth, has prompted renewed
interest in the question of how economic inequalities impact political systems. The potential for redistribution through democratic political systems
in capitalist societies, where all citizens have the right to vote, is an issue that
has exercised social science imaginations since the dawn of mass democracy.
Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn.
© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

150 years on, it is clear that this scenario has not yet come to pass, and
there are few signs suggesting the future might be different or even that the
introduction of democracy necessarily leads to redistribution (Ross, 2006).
The inevitable puzzle, as Shapiro (2002) pithily puts it, is “why don’t the
[vastly more numerous] poor soak the rich?”
If we take the long view, there is little doubt that democratic political systems have been associated with redistribution via the adoption of various
social welfare policies and welfare state institutions, which have become universal and enduringly popular. The rise of the welfare state since the late
nineteenth century has unquestionably enhanced economic opportunity and
raised living standards across the entire population and across the life course
(Garfinkel, Smeeding, & Rainwater, 2010). However, it now appears to most
commentators that we have reached the end of the “golden age” of welfare
state expansion (Pierson, 2001; Streeck, 2012). The political choices that have
been made in the past couple of decades have allowed inequality to surge.
In the longer run of history, the relatively egalitarian twentieth century (and
the innovations in tax and transfer systems adopted, especially in the decades
after World War II) may prove to be the exception to the long-run bias of capitalism toward inegalitarian outcomes (Piketty, 2014). And if so, the sources
of inequality in democratic political systems are likely to provide one key to
understanding this shift. (One could, of course, make similar claims about
authoritarian capitalist societies, but that is not the target of this essay.)
My focus is to get at these larger questions with a somewhat narrower
agenda: what have we learned about are the mechanisms through which
economic inequality impacts democratic politics, and what should future
research address more thoroughly? Political inequality can take one of two
different forms: It may refer to either differential inputs into policymaking
processes, in which some actors have more influence than others, or it can
refer to policy outputs, in particular those which encourage or sustain income
and wealth inequality. It is certainly not obvious that political inequality
should be common feature of democratic political systems. In the classical
pluralist vision of democracy, for example, the resources of affluent actors
in democratic systems can be offset by mobilization of citizens and groups
“from below”; in Galbraith’s (1952) famous formulation, democratic political
systems can be relatively egalitarian and produce redistributive outcomes so
long as ordinary citizens have sufficient “countervailing power” to contest
economic and political elites. Countervailing power is most likely to be
produced by strong unions, social movements from below, or electorally
competitive left (or social democratic) political parties advancing redistributive policy programs. However, in an era of nearly universal union decline
(Silver, 2003; Wallerstein & Western, 2000) and the gradual retreat of social
democratic parties toward less redistributive positions (Therborn, 2008),

Political Inequality

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the weakening of countervailing power now appears to be a central fact of
contemporary democratic capitalism.
FOUNDATIONS
The claim that entrenched biases toward favoring certain kinds of actors
and interests over others arises from some very basic elements of capitalist
democracy. No elected government (subject to periodic reevaluation by its
citizens) can afford to allow a severe economic contraction brought on by
declining business investment if it hopes to remain electorally competitive
(Block, 1987; Lindblom, 1977). Maintaining conditions favorable to investment thus provides a kind of structural power available to the very largest
of individual economic actors, and more generally to politically organized
peak business associations. Block (1987, Chapter 4) nicely captures this
idea with the notion of “business confidence” as the mechanism of structural power that all democratically elected governments must pay some
heed to.
Further, there are easily demonstrable disparities in the class power of different groups, with corporate interests in particular having advantages not
shared by poor people or a disorganized working class. Offe and Wisenthal
(Offe, 1985, Chapter 7) offered one elegant formulation of this idea, arguing
that while the working class had to organize large and often diffuse groups
into unions or social movements, business interests could often exert power
on governments with the mere threat of disinvestment or departure. A single large employer acting on its own has leverage that other groups can only
acquire with high levels of organization.
Taken together, the business confidence and power disparities inherent
to contemporary capitalism create structural conditions for a bias toward
protecting and promoting the interests of economic elites and firms over
everyone else. However, this “structural power” hypothesis has not proved
easy to rigorously test. Classical examples of democratically elected left
governments with an explicitly socialist policy agenda that would unquestionably threaten business confidence are few and far between. Where they
have appeared (e.g., the experience of the French socialists led by President
Francois Mitterand after 1981, the Chilean government under Salvador
Allende in the early 1970s, or the Swedish social democrats in the late 1970s
when the Party’s radical Meidner Plan to promote worker ownership of private firms was shelved once in office) exemplify some of the rapid pressures
that can arise to abandon their program in favor of moderation. However,
systematic analyses with cross-national data are difficult; Przeworski and
Wallerstein (1988) developed one such examination, finding little support
for the structural power hypothesis.

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Aside from being pitched a high level of abstraction, another key problem
for the structural power hypothesis is to account for the fact that every rich
democracy has adopted welfare state initiatives in the face of widespread
opposition by economic elites. In no case have high marginal tax rates on
individual earners—or indeed, any income or corporate taxes at all!—been
adopted without significant ferocious opposition. Similarly, taxes on business profits were, and remain, bitterly contested. Pro-union legislation,
which has enhanced the ability of unions to organize workers, carry out
strikes, and promote collective bargaining over employment terms, has similarly been resisted (at least in its early stages); however, in most countries,
measures to assist union organizing were eventually adopted. Finally, redistributive social programs—most notably national health insurance schemes
and universal pensions—have often been unpopular with putatively power
economic interests but steadily expanded throughout most of the twentieth
century.
In view of such observations and examples, it would be folly to assume
that democratic political systems in capitalist societies cannot promote redistribution, or that the structural power of capital precludes it. However, this
still leaves a key puzzle: In the early decades of the twenty-first century,
democratic governments appear mostly unable to provide continuing benefits and wage growth to the median voter, whereas in most countries, the
very highest earners are seeing their share of income and wealth grow handsomely. Further, social programs benefitting either the median voter or the
poor appear squeezed in a variety of ways, between rising cost pressures
from below and an inability of national governments to increase revenue to
pay for them (Gough & Therborn, 2010). Understanding these patterns suggests the need for a theory of political inequality. I explore leading theoretical
models in the following section.
CONTEMPORARY THEORY AND RESEARCH
ELITE AND OLIGARCHIC THEORIES
One classical model of political inequality hypothesized that a small handful
of actors eventually come to dominate all political systems, democratic
or authoritarian (Michels, 1966 [1911]; Pareto, 1968 [1901]). In the modern
reformulation of elite theory, beginning with Mills (1956), political elites
are viewed as being drawn from a narrow set of institutions with similar
social backgrounds and networks, and they will tend to use political power
to serve their own ends. Elites dominate political offices via selection
mechanisms they control (i.e., who gets into the elite, or who is eligible to
be considered for key appointments in policymaking offices) and by having

Political Inequality

5

disproportionate influence over the outputs of policymaking processes
(Domhoff, 2010, Chapter 3). Elites typically hail from a narrow range of
educational institutions, with schools increasingly displacing families as
the locus of selection (Bourdieu, 1998; Kahn, 2009). Once selected into
elite institutions, individual aspirants must exhibit appropriate levels of
conformity and performance to be advanced up the ranks. Elite status is not
necessarily linked to a particular ideology, political partisanship, or wealth
(elites can have a range of views on political issues, can be found in all major
political parties, and may or may not have personal or familial wealth).
However, because of selection and shared training, elites will tend to share
common views, or at least collectively maintain a narrow range of opinions
that will differ from the rest of the public.
In recent decades, as meritocracy as become an increasingly common
foundation for elite selection (Hayes, 2010), diversity in terms of sociodemographic background is increased (e.g., women and members from minority
group backgrounds have become more common) (see Kahn, 2009; Zweigenhaft & Domhoff, 2006). However, this alone does not necessarily mean that
elite cohesion is declining; as long as the experience of socialization and
selection remain robust. However, whether the elite can plausibly be said
to have a set of common interests is more complicated. From Mills (1956)
onward, there has been a tendency to identify the elite as all of those holding
positions of power in important institutions. This wide-ranging view makes
it difficult to specify the basis on which elites will have common interests.
However, even if we limit the conception to the corporate elite, the problem
is not solved. It is not difficult to show that conflicts within the corporate
community are rampant (Mizruchi, 2013, pp. 15–17). Different firms and
industries are inevitably going to favor different public policies, and perhaps
only at the very top or under certain unique historical contexts is unity
possible (Mizruchi, 2013; Useem, 1984).
In a wide-ranging recent work, Jeffrey Winters (2011) proposes an alternative to elite theory as the foundation for political inequality by focusing more
narrowly on the ways in which the largest wealth holders use political means
to protect their assets from forfeiture. No matter how it is drawn, the entire
“elite” will not have a common interest in protecting large fortunes, as only a
minority of their members will control such fortunes (2011, p. 26ff). Further,
at least in democratic societies, political elites may well have motivations
to promote popular policies, including redistributive ones, which enhance
their electability (in this way, elite theory elides key contrasts between social
democratic and conservative elites). By contrast, Winters argues that large
wealth holders in all societies share a single decisive common interest in the
protection of their fortunes. This motivates them to work within the institutional and political constraints of the context they are living to try to achieve

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

it. These individuals whom Winters refers to as oligarchs are defined by the
possession of sufficient amounts of wealth to engage in what he calls income
defense.
In Winters’ comparative-historical framework, oligarchy can take a wide
variety of forms in different society, depending on whether the principle
threat to wealth comes is competition from other oligarchs, threats to their
wealth holdings from governments (principally in the form of taxation), or
from citizens from below (especially if there is no legal framework capable
of securing protection of private property). In contemporary democracies,
where private property rights are well secured by rule of law, the principle threat to oligarchs is exposure to taxation. Tax avoidance is assisted by
the endless variety of strategies created by an “income defense industry”
that specializes in reducing tax exposure and operates on an increasingly
global scale (Winters, 2011, Chapter 5). Oligarchs are motivated to use political means to limit marginal income tax rates, estate taxes, and promote a
stealthy politics in which wealth and income can be protected through loopholes and exemptions (most notably through overseas storage of wealth subject to minimal or no taxation).
Winters produces some startling historical evidence in favor of the basic
insights of the oligarchy model as a key to understanding political inequality around the world and over time. For example, he shows that the gap
between the richest 1% and the bottom 20% is likely far greater in contemporary societies like the United States (or even Sweden) than the gaps between
the wealthiest 1% and lower strata, even in some cases slaves, in ancient
Greece and Rome. The inability of social democratic countries in Northern
Europe to rein in the wealthiest of families has allowed for the maintenance of
wealth and even permitted the very top in recent years to take off. Finally, the
increasing prominence of the financial sector in the late twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries, both for governments seeking to encourage or maintain growth and for high net-wealth individuals, creates the perfect synergy
for both wealth and income defense (cf. Piketty, 2014).
In spite of its insights, the oligarchy model does not provide much leverage
over the full range of policy inputs and outputs that shape the distribution
of income and wealth across the population. There is also an open question
as to how and why the most important policy shifts favoring oligarchs—first
the rise, then the decline in high marginal rates on top income earners, and
rise and decline of corporate income taxes as well—has happened in virtually
all rich democracies since the 1960s. In the immediate post-World War II era,
marginal tax rates on the highest earning households approached or in some
cases exceeded 90% in many countries. Today, virtually no affluent country
has a marginal income tax rate on top earners above 50%, and in some cases,
effective tax rates are substantially lower. Further, the startling decline in the

Political Inequality

7

rates—and in a number of countries, the outright elimination—of estate taxes
provides another intriguing puzzle: Why would working and middle-class
voters allow such reforms to proceed when they themselves have virtually
no chance of benefitting from them? Oligarchs may have disproportionate
power, but even on key questions of importance to oligarchs other actors
play important roles.
POWER RESOURCES
If the elite and oligarchic models cannot tell us much about how distributive politics for the bottom 99% of the population, we need to turn to
other models for an account of why the variation in redistribution policy
outputs between, say, Norway and the United States are as wide as they
are. The dominant political sociological model for studying comparative
political inequality in recent decades has been what is loosely known as
the power resources approach (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Korpi, 1983). This
approach starts from the assumption that unequal economic relationships,
particularly as exemplified in the class structure, facilitate the formation of
organized groups (or classes, in the Marxian-inspired terminology of early
power resources theory) and ultimately political parties with distinct and
competing interests. Within capitalist democracies, elections—what Korpi
(1983) once influentially called the democratic class struggle—is thus a central
mechanism for political redistribution. However, because the political
capacities of core classes such as industrial owners, farmers, and manual
workers vary over time, as their size and organizational capacity shifts, the
subsequent development of welfare states reflects the institutionalization of
different patterns of class alliance. For instance, when a highly organized
working class is successfully allied with farmers, this tends to facilitate the
emergence of welfare states with extensive social provisions, as in the case
of Sweden. There, universal social security programs were implemented in
conjunction with price subsidies for farmers. By contrast, when the working
class has high levels of regional or racial/ethnic fragmentation that inhibit
class alliances, the interests of employers will figure more centrally in regime
development, as in the case of the United States (Alesina & Glaser, 2004;
Esping-Andersen, 1990). In such cases, social spending and the provision of
government services are likely considerably more restricted.
One of the strengths of the power resources model is that it can account for
variability of economic and political inequalities, depending on the organizational capacity of key social groups. Analysts have postulated the existence
of different types of welfare state “regimes,” in which distinct combinations
of social groups and political parties can be found. In the most common such
typology, associated with the work of Esping-Andersen (1990), there are three

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

ideal types: social democracies (typically those of Northern Europe), Christian democracies (common in Continental Europe), and liberal democracies
(primarily in the Anglo-American countries). In each case, a combination of
similar political forces and political institutions give rise to similar kinds of
policy outputs. The “three worlds” model has been vigorously tested over
the years, with different analysts deriving different clusters depending on
the question and dataset under investigation, but generally finding evidence
supporting the utility of the regime clusters idea as a way of sorting through
cross-national variation (cf. Arts & Gelissen, 2010). Alternative formulations
of the distinctive institutional systems can be found in the “varieties of capitalism” literature (Pontusson, 2005; Soskice & Hall, 2001).
Despite its leverage over comparative outcomes, questions about the
power resources model abound. Perhaps most importantly, in an era where
unions and social democratic parties are declining or retreating from historic
commitments, redistributive social spending in many countries has persisted at high levels (albeit not enough to reverse rising income inequality).
This is a puzzle for power resources theory because the model predicts
social spending to decline. An additional problem is that it assumes a unidimensional form of political alignment, from left to right organized along
preferences for redistribution, which impacts political alignment (Iversen,
2010, pp. 187–188). Yet in many ways, real-world political contests are not
structured that way. Multiple political cleavages, as Lipset [1981 (1961)]
postulated many years ago, can undermine the expression of class politics, as
when working-class voters prefer a right-wing anti-immigrant party, or the
party opposed to affirmative action, or the party advocating “traditional”
family values. Further confused divisions arise when middle-class voters are
drawn to left parties advocating gender equality, tolerance and social rights
for minorities, or stronger environmentalist policies. Such noneconomic
motivations have the potential to break up class-based alignments, and
where especially strong can undermine support for more equality.
THE GLOBALIZATION HYPOTHESIS
A prominent focus of much social science work on the sources of rising political inequality in the modern world has centered on globalization, or more
specifically how increased flows (of trade, people, and investment) across
borders have reduced the capacity of governments to adopt or maintain
policies that would limit economic inequalities. Globalization arguments
have been marshaled to anticipate negative trends in contemporary welfare
state development and, by proxy, political inequality. Here, the growing
international mobility of capital is viewed as inducing “race to the bottom”:
that is, pressures on governments seeking to maintain competitiveness

Political Inequality

9

and avoid disinvestment lead governments to avoid adopting tax and
transfer programs that will discourage investment. In limiting the policy
options available to national governments, economic globalization provides
incentive for policymakers to turn away from traditional forms of social
provision in favor of growth politics that favor capital accumulation.
Using established measures of welfare state output (e.g., as a percentage
of GDP), globalization’s core dimensions can at best be said to have had a
modest, at times positive, influence (Brady, 2010; Iversen, 2010). The impact
of globalization on the ability of governments to raise tax revenues has similarly been shown to be quite limited or nonexistent, even if governments
have tended to move toward more market-conforming patterns of taxation
(e.g., lowering the highest marginal rates, and reducing or eliminating direct
corporate taxation in favor of broader based taxation such as consumption
taxes; see Swank, 2006).
This emerging consensus about the limited impact of globalization
(see Swank, 2010) fits quite well with seminal early commentaries on
issues of globalization and national sovereignty. For example, individual
nation-states, particularly small polities whose economies have always
depended on high levels of trade and participation in the world economy,
have adjusted continuously in the postwar era to anticipate the uncertainties
associated with globalization rather than merely being swallowed by them
(Garrett, 1998; Soskice & Hall, 2001). Further, many social policies aimed
at reducing poverty and inequality, such as jobs training programs and
disability services, can actually enhance economic productivity and global
competitiveness. Social policy innovations within many European nations
can be viewed as a bulwark against deindustrialization and related economic
threats arising from globalization (Iversen, 2010). In short, recent patterns of
economic globalization thus appear quite compatible with the maintenance
of contemporary welfare states, and need not increase political inequality.
PARTICIPATORY INEQUALITIES: POLITICAL INSIDERS AND OUTSIDERS
If the broadest of claims about globalization’s impacts appear overstated,
there at least one way that it is plausibly linked to rising political inequality: by enhancing the divide between those who have full access to politicians
and policymakers, and those whose rights or powers are limited in some way.
These participatory inequalities, as we might call them, have both domestic
and international roots. The seemingly simple right to vote—foundation for
democratic equality—is no longer so simple when growing proportions of
national populations are immigrants (and thereby ineligible to participate).
In the powerful analysis of McCarty, Poole, and Rosenthal (2006) on the US

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

case, rising immigration (in first the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and then again since the 1970s) is associated with both rising economic
inequality and political polarization (with the latter seen as reinforcing trends
toward disenfranchisement and making redistributive policies more difficult). McCarty et al. view that the critical mechanism of immigration’s impact
is political disenfranchisement. Because immigrants are disproportionately
located at the lower rungs of the labor market, as they grow in size the median
voter shifts upward while the bottom groups have artificially reduced political power.
Other types of participatory inequalities have been proposed. A classical
question regarding political inequality concerns group differences in voter
turnout; if well-resourced groups participate in elections at higher levels than
everyone else, a type of de facto inequality emerges even if the right to vote
is universal (Lijphart, 1997). One key conclusion in the literature is that when
overall turnout rates are very high, there are not likely to be a meaningful skew among those who participate. However, as turnout rates drop—a
phenomenon that is occurring in many countries, especially among younger
voters (Franklin, 2004)—the potential for participatory disparities grows. In
countries where turnout rates have historically been low, such as the United
States, it is very likely that policy outcomes have been impacted in favor of
higher resourced groups because of turnout skews (Leighley & Nagler, 2013).
Participation disparities go well beyond voting to include many other ways
in which citizens seek to influence politicians: writing letters or contacting
politicians directly, participating in civic groups, donating money to political causes, and so forth (Scholzman, Verba, & Brady, 2012). The further away
from the simplest political acts we look, the more likely that higher resourced
individuals are going to be participating at much greater rates.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
A central challenge for contemporary research on political inequality has
been to persuasively demonstrate the causal linkages between economic
and political inequalities. The claim that unequal political inputs—or policy
outputs—are, in fact, characteristic of modern political systems has not
proved a simple or straightforward proposition. To go further, researchers
will need to move beyond broad theoretical models that we have at present,
to get “inside” the centers of decision-making, and also to pay more attention to the microfoundations of citizens’ policy attitudes as an adjunct to
understanding why inequality is rising without strong pushback from below.
To give a brief flavor of these challenges, my discussion in this section will
consider in a bit more detail some of the research on the country where rising
economic inequality has been most rapid, and where the political system is

Political Inequality

11

widely thought to be the most open to elite influence: the United States. It is
hard to imagine a national context that would be more likely to have a political system characterized by inequality than the United States. Yet even here
the mechanics of political inequality have proved difficult to specify in adequate detail. There are no shortage of leading contenders that social scientists
have explored in recent years, and I will consider three: (i) The extraordinary
amount of money donated to candidates running for office, which is vastly
higher than in all other democratic countries and has grown steadily over the
past four decades with growing contributions from both affluent individuals
and corporate political action committees; (ii) The system of interest group
lobbying of legislators and regulators, again unique in American politics in
terms of the amount of expenditures devoted and the growth over time in
lobbying activities; (iii) The limits of a two-party system, in which there is no
traditionally social democratic party and one in which party polarization has
increased in recent decades.
None of these standard explanations has provided a firm and robust set of
conclusions, and each remains in need of further explication to understand.
Let us start with political money. American politics have always been awash
with cash, as First Amendment principles have equated “free speech” with
the right to invest in politics and permitted Congress relatively little scope
for setting limits on political investment. Therefore, how and in what ways
might the increased flow political money in recent decades matter? Theories
of “investor” influence on the parties and legislation have proved difficult
to definitively test and validate. The dominant thrust of the recent literature,
however, strongly suggests that the impact of money is modest at best (for
an authoritative review, see Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo, & Snyder, 2003).
In particular, it is never the case that the amount of money coming from any
one donor is of sufficient magnitude to insure a legislator’s vote, especially
as the totals being raised have grown so dramatically. Other factors—party
membership, legislator’s ideology and beliefs, public opinion (perceived or
actual), or strategic calculations about how a vote will impact future career
prospects—have greater measurable impact on legislative behavior in the
most serious research on the topic. This does not mean that large political
donations are irrelevant; they can provide the donor with a kind of insider
access to elected officials that enable donors to press their case or perhaps
gain tax breaks or exemptions inserted into legislation that is largely hidden
from the public view (Clawson, Neustadtl, & Weller, 1998). However, to see
how such access works, social scientists will have to develop new sorts of
data and evidence than we have at the present time.
The system of interest group lobbying has similarly failed to show conclusive evidence that in spite of the mammoth sums spent by corporations, business associations, professional associations, unions, and others, the direction

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EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

of policy is skewed in one direction or the other. The most comprehensive
and systematic recent examination (Baumgartner, Berry, Hojnacki, Kimball,
& Leech, 2009) finds that well-funded corporate lobbies do not prevail any
more often than poorly citizens groups, and perhaps more importantly it is
simply very difficult for any group to shift (or re-frame) the status quo no
matter how much they spend attempting to do so. Other scholarship has
reached similar conclusions (Burstein, 2014; Gilens, 2012, Chapter 5; McKay,
2012). Political lobbying is perhaps better viewed as an arms race—given its
pervasiveness, few groups will feel comfortable not participating, so everyone does it, but the impacts are mixed, hard to pin down, and in general
cannot systematically explain political inequality.
The party system is the third leg of the trio of factors most often pointed to
account for political inequality in America. In particular, changes in the two
major parties since the 1970s appear plausibly linked to policy outputs favoring economic elites, but here again some caution in reaching firm conclusions
is warranted. The Republican Party has unquestionably moved significantly
to the right in recent decades (cf. McCarty et al., 2006), developing and
maintaining an anti-tax, anti-government agenda, and enforcing discipline
on members in a unique way for an American party (cf. Hacker & Pierson,
2005, 2010; Orenstein and Mann, 2011). When in control of both the White
House and Congress, the Party has sponsored major tax reductions and more
recently pressed for substantial reductions in the size and scope of government responsibility. Time-series analyses suggest that Republican presidents
since the 1950s have allowed inequality to grow faster than Democratic
Presidents (Bartels, 2008; Kelly, 2009). Yet several questions remain in need of
further research before the party-centered account could prove adequate. For
example, many key policy initiatives adopted or promoted by Republican
politicians appear to have had broad public support (cf. Gilens, 2012, Chapter
6, noting that in his dataset, the most responsive Presidency since the 1960s
was that of George W. Bush). To what extent were these policies the result of
party activism, or were they more simply the result of underlying views of
the mass public that made it easy to adopt (as Bartels, 2008 has suggested)?
CONCLUSION
Democracy as a political system promises equality of participation and
influence to everyone. Political inequality is not necessarily inevitable, but
the experience of the past couple of decades suggests that democratic political systems may struggle to contain rising income and wealth inequality in
the twenty-first century, and perhaps even more strongly rising economic
inequality has the potential to increase political inequality. There are a
variety of contemporary theoretical models that point to various factors to

Political Inequality

13

account for how and why political inequality arises, or when it is muted. No
one of these models, however, appears to provide a bulletproof explanation.
Perhaps more pressingly, future research needs to get inside capitalist
democracy more fully than it has. Much of the current theorizing is at a
macro level of abstraction that would benefit from deeper exploration of
how policy inputs and outputs are related. To sharpen this point, this essay
concluded with a discussion of the dilemmas and difficulties of explaining
political inequality in the United States, seemingly the easiest case. Certainly,
we can be sure that pressure on social scientists to account for the political
sources of economic inequality is likely to grow in the future.
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Wallerstein, M., & Western, B. (2000). Unions in decline? What has changed and why.
Annual Review of Political Science, 3, 355–77.
Winters, J. (2011). Oligarchy. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Zweigenhaft, R., & Domhoff, G. W. (2006). Diversity in the power elite: How it happened,
why it matters. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield.

FURTHER READING
Howard, C. (2008). The welfare state nobody knows. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Huber, E., & Stephens, J. (2001). Development and crisis of the welfare state: Parties and
policies in global markets. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Iversen, T., & Cusack, T. (2000). The causes of welfare state expansion: Deindustrialization or globalization? World Politics, 52, 313–349.
Krippner, G. (2010). Capitalizing on crisis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Pierson, P., & Skocpol, T. (Eds.) (2007). The transformation of American politics: Activist
government and the rise of conservatism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Rosenfeld, J. (2014). What unions no longer do. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.

JEFF MANZA SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Jeff Manza is Professor of Sociology at New York University (http://
sociology.as.nyu.edu/object/JeffManza). His teaching and research interests lay at the intersection of inequality, political sociology, and public

16

EMERGING TRENDS IN THE SOCIAL AND BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES

policy. His research has examined how different types of social identities
and inequalities influence political processes such as voting behavior,
partisanship, and public opinion (at both the macro and micro levels). He is
the coauthor of Whose Rights?: Counterterrorism and the Dark Side of American
Public Opinion (Russell Sage Foundation Press, 2013); Why Welfare States
Persist (University of Chicago Press, 2007); Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2006); and Social
Cleavages and Political Change (Oxford University Press, 1999). He is currently
completing a book (with Clem Brooks) on the surprising right-turn of the
American public in the face of the Great Recession.
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