Economic inequality and redistribution are among the oldest political economy debates and subjects of research. Machiavelli famously wrote that republics should “keep their treasuries rich and their citizens poor” to ensure those citizens would not become powerful enough to take control of the state. But citizens should also not be left too poor to revolt; hence the need for redistribution (Philp and Pelczynski Reference Philp, Pelczynski, Philp and Pelczynski2012). Although economic inequality, redistribution, and their social and political consequences have informed political decisions for a long time, academic interest in them has fluctuated. After the post–World War II economic settlement and relatively stable inequality levels in Europe and the United States, for example, an American economist claimed that research on the topic was as interesting as “watching the grass grow” (Aaron Reference Aaron1978).
Today, however, rampant inequality has been linked to the global surge in populism, democratic backsliding, and a staggering migration crisis, pushing investigations on the subject again to the forefront of political economy scholarship. Governments in the United States and Europe have cut down on welfare provisions, even as income inequality has been rising. In the Global South, many leaders have, in fact, expanded redistribution policies, but such efforts are not sufficient to counter their countries’ persistent geopolitical peripherality, often reinforced by climate change and political instability. Many books reviewed in this issue shed new light on the inequality scholarship and the related topics of social marginalization, poverty, and state-led redistribution. They furnish novel information about how variations in the distribution of capital affect political institutions, influence regime stability, and fuel contentious politics. Scholars highlight the complex roots and dimensions of inequality under today’s capitalism—which include colonial, ethnic, racial, and religious inequalities, as well as rural and urban divides—and they reveal new insights into how international markets have exacerbated these inequalities over time.
When and Why Inequalities Rise
Why do inequalities continue to rise in the Global North? And why do democratically elected politicians fail to compensate their citizens for mounting inequality? These questions are at the heart of Evelyne Huber and John D. Stephens’s Challenging Inequality: Variations across Postindustrial Societies. Their cross-national comparison of Germany, Spain, Sweden, and the United States lends new weight to the premise that the decline of trade unions and leftist parties has played a critical role in increasing income inequality, especially since the 1980s. Noam Lupu and Jonas Pontusson, who engage in a Critical Dialogue with the authors, further highlight that trade unions have become less egalitarian themselves and that leftist parties are now less concerned with redistribution because they also focus on a range of cultural issues, leaving many members of their traditional support base to look for alternative parties, including populist ones. For their part, Lupu and Pontusson’s edited volume, Unequal Democracies: Public Policy, Responsiveness, and Redistribution in an Era of Rising Economic Inequality, scrutinizes why Western governments have failed to address rising income inequality. Their key argument is that politicians—especially those who are not from the left—are more receptive to the interests of upper-income groups. This is not just the case in the United States, as has long been established, but also in northwest Europe. Lupo and Pontusson show how this unequal representation has reinforced regional divides between metropolitan areas, which have thrived economically, and rural and urban ones, which have generally been left behind. It is these peripheralized localities that today form the backbone of many populist forces.
Although scholarly comparisons between the Global South and the Global North are still relatively sparse, regional divides are also the key topic of Catherine Boone’s book, Inequality and Political Cleavage in Africa: Regionalism by Design, which Anne Pitcher discusses as part of a review essay on the African political economy. Boone shows that politics and conflicts in Africa, long framed primarily through the prism of ethnic rivalries, can, in fact, best be understood as part of long-standing political struggles over resources. Colonial officials privileged regions that were economically promising, creating administrative units to rule them. Contemporary political cleavages in Africa both mirror and reinforce these specific colonial “forms of uneven economic development” (p. 53).
Michaela Collord’s Wealth, Power and Authoritarian Institutions: Comparing Dominant Parties and Parliaments in Tanzania and Uganda shifts our focus from regional inequalities to institutional ones. Collord posits that during key transitional moments, such as independence from colonial rule, African leaders had to make crucial economic choices that help explain contemporary variations in institutional strength. Some leaders decided to centralize economic production and distribution, whereas others allowed space for the private accumulation of wealth. Where leaders chose the latter option, parliaments have been more assertive. This parliamentary assertiveness holds even in contexts of stable authoritarian rule and widespread corruption, such as under the rule of Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni, who came to power as a populist leader almost four decades ago.
Scholars have long argued that high levels of inequality can fuel corruption, which in turn further compromises citizens’ trust in the fairness of their political and economic institutions. This question of corruption, how it persists and reinforces social divides and inequalities, is at the heart of Lucio Picci’s Rethinking Corruption: Reasons behind the Failure of Anti-Corruption Efforts, reviewed by Susan Rose-Ackerman. Focusing on the cases of Russia, Brazil, and the United States, Picci adopts a broad understanding of corruption when arguing that in Russia, “corrupt arrangements between powerful public and private actors prevail”; that the structure of the government in Brazil, rooted in its authoritarian past, still privileges the elite; and that in the United States “legal corruption” is a growing problem, as powerful elites directly influence politics via “campaign contributions and other forms of favoritism” (Rose-Ackerman, this issue). Such practices of “buying” political influence serve to overrepresent elite interests in government decision making, further reinforcing social divides and inequalities.
A Critical Dialogue between Andrea Binder (Offshore Finance and State Power) and Cornelia Woll (Corporate Crime and Punishment: The Politics of Negotiated Justice in Global Markets) moves the discussion on corruption and political privilege from the national to the global level. Binder reveals that governments in Britain, Germany, Brazil, and Mexico have facilitated and often benefited from “allowing an exclusive set of actors to reduce their tax burden and create money offshore” (Woll, this issue). At least this was the case until the 2008 financial crisis exposed the vulnerability of offshore markets. Woll, for her part, reveals how negotiated settlements, which are meant to prosecute corporate misconduct, including tax evasion, money laundering, and fraud, are increasingly being used to protect US global market interests. She argues that it is the “façade of being tough on corporate crime” that has allowed governments to “[wage] economic lawfare not only against its most notorious opponents, such as Russia, China and Iran but also against its closest allies, including Britain, France, Germany, and Japan” (Binder, this issue). President Donald Trump’s tariff warfare can be seen as an unconstrained and unpredictable outgrowth of these preexisting forms of legal economic aggressions. Although primarily meant to reinforce US geopolitical hegemony over key rivals, Trump’s policies hit many vulnerable economies of the Global South particularly hard, reinforcing their geopolitical peripherality.
Redistribution amid Rising Inequalities
Rising inequalities and declining economic redistribution have contributed to the rise of populist forces in long-standing democracies. Main targets of populist leaders are welfare systems for all, with leaders like Donald Trump cutting welfare provisions or right-wing “People Parties” such as those in Denmark, Germany, or Austria promoting a “welfare nationalism” that excludes migrants from benefits. In this context, it is particularly notable that in the Global South many countries have expanded their welfare provisions more generally over the past decades, sometimes under populist rule.
Welfare Goes Global: Making Progress and Catching Up, written by Richard Rose and reviewed by Anthony Gregory, shows that the “globalization of welfare has reached a point where a majority of households on every continent have access to one or more forms of welfare” (p. 16). Like many other authors featured in this issue, Rose highlights the challenges involved in measuring welfare provision, inequality, and poverty, particularly cross-nationally, because data in many countries are not reliable and scholars use different measurements for key concepts. The Politics of Welfare in the Global South, edited by Sattwick Dey Biswas, Cleopas Gabriel Sambo, and Sony Pellissery, adds further details on the distinctive forms of redistribution at work in the Global South. The authors highlight the many informal redistributive mechanisms that scholars tend to miss because they often focus on formal state-managed welfare. Reviewer Erdem Yörük adds that one of the most notable trends is the emergence of “populist welfare regimes”—that is, states that have enlarged redistribution when populists were in power, mostly under the leadership of leftist figures, such as Brazil’s Lula de Silva and Greece’s Alexis Tsipras, but sometimes also under right-wing regimes, such as that of India’s Narendra Modi.
In fact, Modi made the expansion of welfare provisions a central cornerstone of his populist agenda, having spent more than $400bn on redistribution over the past decade. And yet his Hindu nationalism has contributed to the marginalization of many sections of society, especially the country’s large Muslim minority, a topic discussed in Tanu Kumar’s review essay, “Agency and Autonomy at the Margins of the Modern Indian State.” In one of the books that Kumar reviews, titled India’s Bangladesh Problem: The Marginalization of Bengali Muslims in Neoliberal Times, author Navine Murshid explores how Bengali Muslims face persistent stigmatization, violence, and reduced employment opportunities. This is especially true for those who do not master Hindi or English. Adam Michael Auerbach and Tariq Thachil’s Migrants and Machine Politics: How India’s Urban Poor Seek Representation and Responsiveness shifts our focus to the many impoverished Indians who moved from rural to urban areas in the hope of a better life and typically live in informal settlements. Auerbach and Thachil argue that, despite their social and economic marginalization, these citizens have exercised important forms of agency, because informal settlements are often seen as “vote banks” for which different parties compete. Yet Modi’s rise and his centralization of politics are likely to reduce their voice over time.
The important question of how regime type and institutions affect the ability and willingness of governments to tax and to redistribute is also at the center of Lucy Martin’s book Strategic Taxation: Fiscal Capacity and Accountability in African States, the subject of a symposium in this issue. Martin argues that where state capacity is low, as is the case in most of Africa, democratization and elections weaken politicians’ incentive to tax. This is because politicians fear that taxation would raise voter demands, which they often cannot meet, hence triggering political opposition.
Whereas Martin’s book is based on rational choice models, Ashkay Mangla’s Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India places the “beyond rational” motivations for service deliveries center stage in his “painstakingly researched” book, notes reviewer Prerna Singh. Mangla identifies how different types of norms explain variations in regional policy implementation. He finds that where deliberative norms prevail over rule-based ones, local bureaucrats exhibit higher degrees of “flexibility, creativity, and openness,” leading to better policy outcomes. All in all, these works prompt scholars to pay close attention to how both formal and informal institutions, including populist ones, shape and are shaped by inequalities and peripheralization, with important consequences for socioeconomic redistribution.
Regional Divides, Mobilization, and Left-Wing Populism
When, why, and where do inequality and poverty give way to contentious politics? This question is at the heart of Simón Escoffier’s monograph Mobilizing at the Urban Margins: Citizenship and Patronage Politics in Post-Dictatorial Chile. Focusing on the two impoverished Santiago neighborhoods of La Hermida and Nuevo, he asks why citizens in the former regularly stage protests and revolt, whereas in the latter they are relatively tranquil and unmobilized. Escoffier finds that in La Hermido, a diverse associational life and rich cultural organizations have boosted the contentious repertoire and strengthened what he calls the “mobilizational citizenship” of the neighborhood. By contrast, Nuevo’s civil society is closely linked to official political institutions and therefore struggles to challenge them.
Benjamin Bradlow, who engages in a Critical Dialogue with Escoffier, also places civil society activism center stage when scrutinizing when and why local governments succeed in reducing inequality. In Urban Power: Democracy and Inequality in Sāo Paulo and Johannesburg, he investigates variation in governance in the two cities, which are both characterized by rapid urbanization and deep-rooted inequalities. He illustrates that in Sāo Paulo, strong state–civil society linkages furthered redistributive politics and broadened access to many basic goods and services, such as sanitation, housing, and transportation. In Johannesburg, by contrast, linkages between the state and civil society are weak and bureaucratic coordination is incohesive, reinforcing urban divides and social exclusion.
Tom Goodfellow’s Politics and the Urban Frontier: Transformation and Divergence in Late Urbanizing East Africa, discussed in Anne Pitcher’s review essay, shifts our focus to global markets as drivers of urban change and development. Focusing on the East African cities of Addis Ababa, Kampala, and Kigali, Goodfellow shows how investments, mainly from China, have boosted developments there. He explains variations in urban development in terms of how political leaders seek legitimacy for infrastructure projects and how “associational power” is organized in the cities. Goodfellow shows that citizens sometimes use informal institutions and channels to challenge urban megaprojects, and their contentious repertoire ranges from promoting “informal settlements across urban spaces to…[protests] that residents may adopt to challenge policies with which they disagree” (Pitcher, this issue).
Kathleen Bruhn’s Politics and the Pink Tide: A Comparative Analysis of Protest in Latin America—reviewed by Laurence Whitehead as part of an essay on “kaleidoscopic patterns of politics in Latin America”—examines the relationship between protest movements, neoliberalism, and economic reforms. The Pink Tide refers to a surge in left-wing politics in Latin America in the 1990s and 2000s, with populist leaders like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Lula in Brazil promising to tackle inequality and poverty by expanding social programs and redistributive politics. Bruhn highlights the important role of political parties in mobilizing people in favor of these reforms. And yet, the “Pink Tide parties that first gained traction in part through protest politics often went on to lose momentum or fracture under the pressure of subsequent protest experiences” because they failed to live up to their promises, notes reviewer Whitehead. Many, in fact, were succeeded by right-wing populists, such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro or El Salvador’s populist conservative Nayib Bukele.
Peter D. Thomas’s Radical Politics: On the Causes of Contemporary Emancipation, reviewed by Michael Hardt, seeks to shed light on why some of the most ambitious recent political struggles have lost momentum, including not only Latin America’s Pink Tide but also Black Lives Matter and, in Greece, Syriza and Podemos’s radical-left critique of austerity—diverse projects that all sought to tackle different forms of inequalities and injustices. Through a reevaluation of Gramsci’s political thought, Thomas stresses the importance of “hegemony” as a political strategy that “is driven and composed simultaneously by forces from below and from above,” combines “associative and organizational instances,” and rejects “centralized control,” writes reviewer Hardt. These insights, alongside learning processes from past political struggles, can inform future citizen demands and action for greater equality and representation.
Contesting Inequality
What all the books in this issue highlight is the sticky nature of economic inequalities, injustices, and privilege, which risk becoming self-reinforcing over time. Although some left-wing populists have pursued ambitious redistributive programs to address them, right-wing populists, for the most part, have proposed solutions via ethnonationalist politics, either outright reducing the welfare state or enshrining further inequalities by distinguishing between those “deserving” and “undeserving” of welfare. How can rising socioeconomic inequalities be effectively contested? And who ultimately bears responsibility for these asymmetries of economic power? Samuel Ely Bagg’s The Dispersion of Power: A Critical Realist Theory of Democracy, reviewed by Andrew Sabl, seeks to answer the former question, whereas Maeve McKeon’s With Power Comes Responsibility: The Politics of Structural Injustice, reviewed by Farid Abdel-Nour, sheds light on the latter.
The rise of inequalities and right-wing populism poses a direct challenge to liberal democracy, and yet, as Samuel Ely Bagg posits, today’s political challenges can best be addressed by democratic governance itself, which he understands as a project to resist state capture by powerful interests. This resistance entails the “constant mitigation of asymmetries in private power and organizational capacity” in pursuit of the utopian objective of a “roughly egalitarian balance of social forces,” reflects reviewer Sabl. Maeve McKeown, for her part, stresses that the agents who either actively perpetuate or could take action to mitigate these inequalities and structural injustices—most importantly, powerful corporations and state actors—must take responsibility for their actions (or for their failures to act). She convincingly shows that many of the most pressing structural injustices, such as global poverty, are avoidable and deliberate. Countries of the Global North could, for example, provide debt relief to the Global South to lessen these inequalities, but they consistently fail to do so.
Although citizens are not “morally responsible” for the unequal structures they are linked to through their everyday practices, such as sweatshop labor, McKeown argues that they do in fact bear a form of political responsibility that involves organizing themselves to contest these injustices through democratic means. This is, in fact, a key premise on which all authors in this issue agree: civil society activism and mobilization have, in the past, been most successful in contesting inequalities locally, nationally, and globally. Citizens must find new mechanisms, both formal and informal, to organize, make policy demands, and hold their political representatives accountable for today’s staggering divides in wealth and resources.
