Inequality as Relative Deprivation: Theoretical Issues and Implications for Empirical Research

Although concerns for social inequality are at the heart of the sociological tradition, few sociologists have taken a serious interest in the normative and methodological issues involved in the choice between different measures of inequality. In this paper I shall argue that the widely used but also widely criticized Gini index can be seen to incorporate a particularly sociological conception of inequality. The Gini index has features that are alien to mainstream welfare economics, but perfectly sensible if inequality is understood more sociologically as arising from a state of relative deprivation. However, based on a discussion of W.G. Runciman's classical treatment of relative deprivation, I show that the commitment to a relativistic conception of inequality leads to serious theoretical and practical complications. By invoking the sociological notion of relative deprivation one is inevitably opening a Pandora box of questions about how people actually evaluate their own position in society. The implicit rationale of the Gini index assumes that it is applied to a " reference population " – where everybody are comparing themselves with everybody. It is not obvious that the residents of a nation state always constitute the best approximation to a reference population in this sense, and arguments can be found both for widening and narrowing the scope of the relevant population. Issues of aggregation and disaggregation from whatever is considered to be the " appropriate " scope of the reference population are problematic and they require different methodological solutions.