Unequal Democracies

While economic inequality has risen in every affluent democracy in North America and Western Europe, the last three decades have also been characterized by falling or stagnating levels of state-led economic redistribution. Why have democratically accountable governments not done more to distribute top-income shares to citizens with low- and middle-income? Unequal Democracies offers answers to this question, bringing together contributions that focus on voters and their demands for redistribution with contributions on elites and unequal representation that is biased against less-affluent citizens. While large and growing bodies of research have developed around each of these perspectives, this volume brings them into rare dialogue. Chapters also incorporate analyses that center exclusively on the United States and those that examine a broader set of advanced democracies to explore the uniqueness of the American case and its contribution to comparative perspectives. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

1. The political puzzle of rising inequality Noam Lupu and Jonas Pontusson; Part I. Government Responsiveness: 2. Unequal responsiveness and government partisanship in Northwest Europe Ruben Berge Mathisen, Wouter Schakel, Svenja Hense, Lea Elsässer, Mikael Persson and Jonas Pontusson; 3. Democracy, class interests, and redistribution: what do the data say? Mads Andreas Elkjær and Torben Iversen; 4. Measuring political inequality Larry M. Bartels; 5. Why so little sectionalism in the contemporary United States? The under-representation of place-based economic interests Jacob S. Hacker, Paul Pierson and Sam Zacher; Part II. Political Inequality and Representation: 6. On the mechanisms behind unequal representation in legislatures Michael Becher and Daniel Stegmueller; 7. How do the educated govern? Evidence from Spanish mayors Marta Curto-Grau and Aina Gallego; 8. Working-class officeholding in the OECD Nicholas Carnes and Noam Lupu; 9. Political participation and unequal representation: Addressing the endogeneity problem Ruben Berge Mathisen and Yvette Peters; Part III. Voters and Demand for Redistribution: 10. Fairness reasoning and demand for redistribution Charlotte Cavaillé; 11. The news media and the politics of inequality in advanced democracies J Scott Matthews, Timothy Hicks and Alan M. Jacobs; 12. Deflecting from racism: local talk radio conversations about the murder of George Floyd Katherine J. Cramer; 13. Class and social policy representation Macarena Ares and Silja Häusermann; Bibliography; Index.