Political Inequality in an Age of Democracy

Cross-national Perspectives

Joshua Dubrow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415858601
• eBook ISBN: 9781135102340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The world has witnessed the creation of new democracies and the maturing of old ones. Yet, everywhere there is democracy, there is also political inequality. Voices of everyday folk struggle to be heard; often, they keep silent. Governments respond mostly to the influential and the already privileged. Our age of democracy, then, is the old age of inequality. This book builds on U.S. scholarship on the topic of political inequality to understand its forms, causes and consequences around the world.

Comprised of nine theoretical, methodological and empirical chapters, this path-creating edited collection contains original works by both established and young, up-and-coming social scientists, including those from Latin America, Eastern Europe, Greece and the U.S. Political Inequality in an Age of Democracy addresses the present and future of the concept of political inequality from multi-disciplinary and cross-national perspectives.

Part I Concepts and theories of political inequality

1 The concept and study of political inequality

Joshua Kjerulf Dubrow

DOI: 10.4324/9780203797907-1

In this chapter I bring together multi-disciplinary and cross-national perspectives to explore the concept of political inequality. I hope to reveal its conceptual complexity and ways to understand it. Due to this complexity, no single chapter, or book, could adequately cover the entirety of the concept and study of political inequality. As such, this chapter is a survey of this wide, fragmented field that suggests its potentially interdisciplinary future. I begin with an attempt to map the field.

Mapping the field of political inequality

Many disciplines range across the wide field of political inequality. Political inequality is found in political science literatures on democratic theory and practice, sociological literatures on social stratification and power, philosophical literatures on the nature of equality, law and policy literatures on equality legislation, and potentially in any study of decision-making processes characterized as political, from preindustrial societies to modern ones. Mapping this field highlights how many different disciplines contribute to our understanding of the concept.

To conceive of the map, I took a social constructionist approach because, more than anything else, what scholars actually do defines their field. To sketch it, I employed search engines of research databases to sort through thousands of topics and journals using “political inequality” and “political equality” as key terms. I settled for restrictions: it had to be an English-language article published in a journal¹ that is listed in either of two popular research article databases – ISI Citation Database and EBSCO² – and the article had to have an abstract. I retrieved 156 articles published between 1991 and 2012 where “political inequality” or “political equality” was in the topic, title, or mentioned in the abstract.³

I read and coded each abstract. I based my coding methods on quasi-grounded theory, meaning that I had a few concepts in mind – disciplines, sub-topics, methodology, country focus – but I also allowed other themes to emerge (for this method, see Schwalbe et al. 2000 and Pawlowski and Dubrow 2012). Afterward, I discarded all abstracts where political inequality was either casually included with other inequalities, or was only briefly mentioned, without any sustained effort to define it and understand it as a distinct topic. This yielded 124 relevant articles.⁴

Before I present the results of this modest analysis, a comment on inclusion is needed. Some may wonder whether this method substantially under-represents research in political science and political sociology. In one interpretation, the core concept of political science is political power (Dahl and Levi 2009: 9). Much of political sociology is about unequal political voice (for an overview of that field, see Janoski et al. 2005). From this point of view, any academic research on political participation, social movements, parties, representation and governance as they exist in modern democracies is, in essence, about political inequality. While these literatures are part of the study of political inequality, only a subset directly engages with the concept as a whole and elucidates its dimensions. For example, Stanley Verba’s classic works on participation is about unequal voice, yet it is his article, “Fairness, Equality and Democracy: Three Big Words” (2006) that is squarely on the concept of political equality (see also Verba 2003). Likewise, while there is a large philosophical literature on equality, very little is focused on political equality, a longstanding gap (see Ware 1981: 392, footnote 1; and Baynes 2008: 23, footnote 6). In this chapter I am especially concerned with research that directly engages with the concept of political inequality and how to measure it, rather than with research that uses it as a backdrop to stage related phenomena. In this way, I most likely left out articles that others would take. However, whether I should include the brigade of political participation articles or not, or the battalion of social movement articles or not, or the platoon of democratic values articles or not, is unlikely to change the substance of the arguments I make below.

The systematic reading of the 124 abstracts of articles spanning 1991–2012 reinforces the point that political inequality research is diverse in disciplinary input, methods and topics. Few clear patterns emerged. The journal articles come from anthropology, archeology, area studies, international relations, law and policy,⁵ philosophy,⁶ political science, social work, sociology and gender studies. About a third are political science journals, with the rest spread out across the other disciplines.

Rough counts give a rough feel for the methodological, topic and country foci. Methodologically, almost a third of the 124 articles are philosophy and theory driven, and about a quarter are quantitative and feature empirical measures of aspects of the concept. The topics also vary greatly. About a quarter of the coded articles are about the relationship between economic and political spheres, such as campaign finance (of which almost all are about the US) and virtually every study of political participation. After that, the field is widespread, featuring articles on representation, gender, voting, deliberative and participative democracy, racial and ethnic minorities, policy preferences, civil society, global governance, reforming democratic rules, rights and citizenship, among others. Over half of these articles are about a country or a set of countries, and among them, almost half study the United States.

If there is a pattern to political inequality research, one might say that it is driven by political science and law, most often theoretical or analyzing policy, and about modern democracies.

Inequality in the study of inequalities

Unlike other forms of inequality, political inequality is underexplored. Economic inequality is a relevant example. Using the ISI database and a similar method to that of searching for English-language articles on political (in)equality, I compared economic (in)equality with political (in)equality. Two interesting findings emerged. First, if we are to judge by numbers, the study of economic inequality is much more popular than that of political inequality. Second, the vocabulary we use says something about how we identify the phenomena. It appears that academics are more comfortable talking about economic inequality than economic equality, and about political equality than political inequality. Perhaps the norm is to be politically equal yet economically unequal.

What is political inequality?

In answering the question of, “what is political inequality?” I make the following set of arguments that I expand on below:

• Political inequality can occur in any structure with an identifiable political process.
• Political inequality, like all other forms of inequality, is meaningfully distinguished by equality of opportunities and equality of outcomes.
• Political inequality is both a dimension of democracy and a dimension of stratification.
• Political inequality interacts with other inequalities.
• Political inequality can be a social structure.
• While we know that political inequality exists, there is no evidence that political equality ever existed.

In most works, the definition of political inequality is more implied than explicitly stated (Dubrow 2010). Other works, such as Griffin and Newman’s (2008: 6–7, chapter 2), carefully and usefully define political equality (though limited to the American experience). I examine several definitions of political inequality that are in the literature. I end the section with an interdisciplinary definition that can be applied across a variety of social and political systems.

Table 1.1 Comparison of economic in/equality with political in/equality in terms of articles concerning each, 1945–2012

Key word	Title	Topic
Inequality
“economic inequality”	190	761
“political inequality”	12	45
Equality
“economic equality”	36	98
“political equality”	49	156
Source: ISI Citation database: 1945–2012.

Most definitions can be traced to the distinction made in the classic social stratification literature on equality of opportunities versus equality of outcomes (Kerbo 2003: chapter 1; see also the philosophical literature, e.g. Ware 1981: 393; Baynes 2008: 15; and Roemer 1998: 1–2). Briefly, equality of opportunities is about access to the political decision. Equality of outcomes refers to the law, symbols, policy or other output that is the result of the political process. Most definitions are based on the idea of equality of opportunities, but they could be modified to include outcomes, as well.

A popular definition usually posited in terms of equality of opportunities is what I call the “distributional approach”: political inequality is structured differences in the distribution of political resources. According to this definition, one group has greater or lesser access to or acquisition of political resources than another group (Ware 1981: 393–394; Wall 2007: 416).⁷ Many years ago, Max Weber (1946) argued that the tripartite scheme of class, status and party is but “phenomena of the distribution of power within a community” (181). The distributional approach is reflected more recently in the 1996 American Political Science Association presidential address, in which Lijphart warned that “the inequality in representation and influence are not randomly distributed but systematically biased in favor of more privileged citizens” (1997: 1).

The notion of “political resources” is an appealing analogy to economic resources, yet it presents dilemmas for concept and measurement. A primary issue is that political resources are anything one can use to influence a political decision. Moreover, the means of wielding these resources varies by level – individual, group organization or country – and by context. Some simplify by equating material resources in modern democracies – money, most of all – with political power (Winters and Page 2009; Brady 2009: 98–99). This is problematic, as social scientists have long argued that political resources are context-dependent and therefore can be more than just economic. Weber (1946) viewed power resources of political organizations as almost anything,⁸ while Dahl (1996) defines political resources as, literally, “almost anything” – including money, reputation, legal status, social capital and knowledge, to name a few – that has value and can be used to achieve political ends. Political resources can be drawn from social or psychological factors – material, ideational, a personal attribute, a group level attribute, an authority position, a network connection – or an action, such as political participation (Dahl 1996; Yamokoski and Dubrow 2008; Wall 2007: 418; for an exhaustive review of the political resources literature, see Piven and Cloward 2005: 38–40).

Identifying the mechanism by which political resources are distributed poses further dilemmas. Who distributes these resources? Is distribution done in the same manner across all political interactions and if not, by what rules does it vary? And, if political resources can be distributed, does the “distributor” hoard all of the resources that are important for the political interaction, or are there some resources that are beyond the hoarder’s control? We face these dilemmas when we strictly define political inequality as a matter of distribution.

An interdependency approach, as inspired by Piven and Cloward (2005), poses a way out of the dilemma by ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Political inequality in an age of democracy—JOSHUA KJERULF DUBROW
• PART I Concepts and theories of political inequality
• PART II Methodological considerations
• PART III Empirical analyses
• Conclusion: Lessons learned—JOSHUA KJERULF DUBROW