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Growing dissatisfaction among the population, loss of trust in politics, increase in crime and violence: Economic inequality leads to a variety of social consequences. Nevertheless, the issue plays a much smaller role in the election manifestos of political parties both in Germany and in other countries than researchers had previously assumed. These are the results of a by the Cluster of Excellence The Politics of Inequality at the University of Konstanz, recently published in the journal American Political Science Review.

Alexander Horn, lead author of the study and research group leader of the Emmy Noether Group Varieties of Egalitarianism, says, "Especially in countries where economic inequality is already very pronounced among the population, political parties largely ignore the issue in their programs. This even is the case with left-wing parties."

Strong income growth at the top of the distribution, i.e. among those with particularly high incomes, too, is not on their agendas. Even gains by the richest one percent of the population do not lead to a corresponding political reaction.

Horn says, "We assume that the causes are structural distortions in democratic processes: The richest people in a society often remain invisible to the public. The poorer sections of the population, on the other hand, fail to overcome mobilization hurdles. There is also a tendency to justify the unequal status quo in meritocratic terms, i.e. to argue that the availability of financial resources is linked to personal performance."

Only when inequality in a country increases, as people at and below the median income fall further behind, will the parties react. The exception being right-wing parties, as the study shows: they react neither to high income levels nor to changes in economic inequality.

The study provides insights into structural weaknesses in democracy. According to Horn, the results show that democracies do not automatically correct high (income) inequality. "On the contrary, they can create mechanisms that perpetuate inequality—and this even applies to left-wing parties and governments," says Horn.

Methodology

For their study, the political scientists led by Alexander Horn systematically analyzed 850,000 statements from election manifestos in 12 OECD countries over a period of 50 years (1970–2020) using online crowdcoding.

Online crowdcoding refers to the platform-based internet collaboration of many people who jointly analyze large amounts of data by coding or classification. In its entirety, this approach is a methodological innovation that has helped to relativize earlier research findings that wrongly assumed a stronger political reaction of left-wing parties to income inequality.