Bartels reviews recent research on political inequality, with particular emphasis on the grounding of empirical analyses in democratic theory. He distinguishes two types of inequality – of policy congruence and of influence – and surveys a variety of conceptual and methodological challenges arising in attempts to measure them. Congruence is the extent of agreement between citizens’ preferences and politicians’ choices, and assessing it requires careful calibration on both sides. Influence is the causal impact of citizens’ preferences on politicians’ choices, and assessing it raises much the same plethora of challenges involved in any complex causal inference. While research based upon these concepts is at an embryonic stage, studies in a variety of countries employing a variety of research designs suggest that inequality of influence is common and substantial, while inequality in congruence is generally more modest – a situation sometimes characterized as “democracy by coincidence.”

Do highly educated politicians adopt different public policies than less-educated politicians? Existing research disagrees about this question. While some recent studies argue that highly educated politicians deliver better performance, others find no effects of education on economic or public policy outcomes. This article studies this question using a comprehensive dataset with information about the education, age, and gender of elected local politicians in Spain and fine-grained economic and fiscal data collected between 2003 and 2011. Applying a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, we find that when parties with more-educated councilors narrowly win the election, governments do not perform better on a number of valence indicators. However, further analyses reveal that local governments led by more-educated politicians have lower levels of capital spending and capital transfers per capita. Our findings suggest that educated and noneducated politicians differ on preferences rather than on ability and call into question that education can be used as a proxy of the “quality” of politicians.

Since the 1990s, economic inequality has risen in just about every affluent democracy in North America and Western Europe. But the last three decades have also been characterized by falling or stagnating levels of state-led economic redistribution. These two contemporaneous trends pose a puzzle for students of political economy. Why have democratically accountable governments not done more to compensate the large majority of citizens with low and middle income for rising top-income shares? Our introductory chapter begins by describing this puzzle of rising inequality and noting some nuances that most accounts regularly miss. We then examine two groups of explanations for the puzzle of rising inequality: one set that focuses on voters and their demands for redistribution, and another that focuses on elites and unequal representation that is biased against less-affluent citizens. This volume seeks to contribute to explaining the puzzle of rising inequality by bringing these two groups of explanations into dialogue with each other. We describe the contributions of the individual chapters to these efforts and suggest directions for future research.

How do organized interests contribute to unequal representation in contemporary democracies? We discuss two central channels: the selection of partisan legislators through elections and postelectoral influence via lobbying. We argue that these channels are potentially complementary strategies used by rational actors. Employing a game-theoretic model and simulations of interest group influence on legislative voting, we show that this logic may explain interest group strategies in unequal times. Our model implies that interest group strategies vary with party polarization and it highlights a challenge for empirical research on unequal representation and the literature on lobbying. Using statistical models commonly used in the literature to study biases in legislative voting or policy adoption, researchers are likely to overstate the relevance of elections as a channel through which groups affect legislative responsiveness and understate the role interest groups’ postelectoral influence. Our results stress the importance of theoretical models capturing the strategic behavior of political actors as a guiding light for the empirical study of mechanisms of unequal representation.

Why do working-class people so rarely go on to hold elected office in the world’s democracies? In this chapter, we review what scholars know and use new data on the social class backgrounds of national legislators in the OECD to evaluate several country-level explanations that have never been tested before in a large sample of comparative data. Our findings suggest that some hypotheses have promise and warrant future research: working-class people more often hold office in countries where labor unions are stronger and income is distributed more evenly. However, some common explanations do not pan out in our data – neither Left-party strength nor proportional representation is associated with working-class officeholding – and the various country-level explanations scholars have discussed in the past only account for at most 30 percent of the gap between the share of workers in the public and in national legislatures. Future research should focus comparative analyses on individual- and party-level explanations and consider the possibility that there are factors common to all democracies that limit working-class officeholding.

Political research has argued that systematic inequalities in political participation are bound to produce a system that caters more to those who actively voice their opinions. Yet it might be that citizens who rarely see their preferences translated to policy are discouraged from participating in politics. In this chapter, we attempt to estimate the extent to which unequal representation affects participation. Using nine survey measures of system satisfaction across twenty-nine European countries, and looking at nine forms of political participation, we decompose gaps in participation and estimate counterfactually how large these gaps would have been if low-educated and poor citizens had the same beliefs about the system as more-educated and affluent citizens. We find that the gap in voting between the bottom and top education/income quintile would be around 15 20 percent smaller if those groups were equally optimistic about the workings of the system. These results suggest that unequal participation is partly attributable to the system being unequally responsive.

This paper pools datasets on policy responsiveness to public opinion in Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. Following the empirical strategy set out by Gilens (2012), we show that the policy outputs correspond much better to the preferences of affluent citizens than to the preferences of low- and middle-income citizens in all four countries. We proceed to explore how government partisanship conditions unequal responsiveness. In so doing, we distinguish between economic/welfare issues and other issues and we also distinguish between the period before 1998 and the period since 1998. Our findings suggest that policymaking under Left-leaning governments was relatively more responsive to low- and middle-income citizens in the economic/welfare domain before 1998, but this was not true for other policy domains before 1998 and it is no longer true for the economic/welfare domain. We conclude with some general reflections on the implications of our empirical findings for the literature on mechanisms of unequal representation in liberal democracies.

What has allowed inequalities in material resources to mount in advanced democracies? This chapter considers the role of media reporting on the economy in weakening accountability mechanisms that might otherwise have incentivized governments to pursue more equal outcomes. Building on prior work on the United States, we investigate how journalistic depictions of the economy relate to real distributional developments across OECD countries. Using sentiment analysis of economic news content, we demonstrate that the evaluative content of the economic news strongly and disproportionately tracks the fortunes of the very rich and that good (bad) economic news is more common in periods of rising (falling) income shares at the top. We then propose and test an explanation in which pro-rich biases in news tone arise from a journalistic focus on the performance of the economy in the aggregate, while aggregate growth is itself positively correlated with relative gains for the rich. The chapter’s findings suggest that the democratic politics of inequality may be shaped in important ways by the skewed nature of the informational environment within which citizens form economic evaluations.

A new literature on advanced democracies questions the capacity of majorities to influence fiscal policies to advance their distributive interests, either because the modern state is undercut by increasingly footloose capital, or because the wealthy subvert the majority will through the power of money. This paper critically assesses the evidence using an amended dataset from the Luxembourg Income Study and new data from the World Inequality Database (WID). We use a three-class setup and axiomatically derive the distributive interests of each class and then assess these predictions against data on transfers, public services, and insurance for eighteen OECD countries since the 1970s. For the middle class, the transfer ratio (transfers and services as a percent of the net income of the rich) is remarkably stable, and with the notable exception of the United States, so is the relative position of the middle class in the overall income distribution. Top-end inequality and measures of globalization play no role, but both the poor and the middle class do better under center-left governments.

Racism is a leading explanation for the lack of redistribution in the United States compared to other advanced democracies. But how does this work? This paper investigates how racism interrupts support for redistribution. I use analytic listening of broadcasts about the May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd and resulting protests that aired on right-leaning local talk radio shows from five communities in predominantly white, nonmetro areas of the northern United States, and broadcasts from three left-leaning shows that serve as bases of comparison to investigate. I find that the hosts and most callers on the conservative shows actively deflect attention away from racism in the United States. Through the lenses with which they treat racism, there is little possibility for feeling empathy with lower-income people of color. The results draw attention to a Republican framing in which Democrats are using attention to racism to achieve downward redistribution.