SOCIAL INEQUALITY AS A POLITICAL PROBLEM

The Political Meanings of Social Class Inequality

Research on a wide range of topics related to rising economic inequality is flourishing throughout the social sciences. One topic that is gaining fresh attention is the politics of inequality. We know very little, however, about how Americans define and perceive inequality or how they express and enact their political desires for more or less of it. In the absence of such knowledge, and under t...

Inequality as pollution, pollution as inequality The social-ecological nexus

Coordination as a Political Problem August 2004, 1 Coordination as a Political Problem in Coordinated Market Economies

The purpose of this article is to explore the political dynamics of employer coordination in three well-known “coordinated market economies.” We examine differences in how employer coordination has been organized in Germany, Sweden, and Japan in the area of industrial relations, and we examine the extent to which such coordination represents a selfsustaining equilibrium, as some of the most inf...

Economic Inequality, Redistribution, and Political Inequality

Based on individual and macro-level data collected in 18 OECD democracies, we find that income inequality at the macrolevel depresses electoral participation. At the level of individual citizens, we find that the effects of income differentials are linear: individuals who are below the median income in society are less likely to participate in elections, while those above the median income are ...

Political conservatism as motivated social cognition.

Analyzing political conservatism as motivated social cognition integrates theories of personality (authoritarianism, dogmatism-intolerance of ambiguity), epistemic and existential needs (for closure, regulatory focus, terror management), and ideological rationalization (social dominance, system justification). A meta-analysis (88 samples, 12 countries, 22,818 cases) confirms that several psycho...