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Consequences of social inequality for democracy in Western Europe

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Abstract

Research on social inequality speaks of a major change in income inequality that has been taking place since the 1970s. At first, inequality in income distribution mainly occurred in Anglo-Saxon countries, but it has also been on the rise in Western Europe over the last decades. In light of this trend, we ask how inequality affects political participation and attitudes towards democracy. In our article, we first consider the increasing income inequality in OECD countries. We then analyze data from 17 Western European democracies from the European Social Survey. The analysis shows that an increase in unconventional forms of participation inhibits the ideal of political equality as these are more heavily biased towards the well-to-do than conventional forms of participation, particularly the act of voting. Third, we run a multilevel regression with survey data and a number of country-level variables to show that people are not only less satisfied with the way democracy works in countries with greater income inequality, but the citizens of these countries also trust politicians and parliaments less.

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Notes

  1. Dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy within one’s own country should not be equated with alienation towards democracy as a form of government. In the European Social Survey, upon which the following analyses draw, attitudes towards real, everyday democracy are sought, not those towards its basic principle. See Linde and Eckman (2003).

  2. This statement is based upon data from the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS): http://www.lisproject.org/key-figures/key-figures.htm (as consulted on 16.09.2009).

  3. The findings given in Table 1 refer to interviewees’ own responses. As a rule, real voter turnout is somewhat lower. See Caballero (2005, p. 334–336).

  4. Particularly in the case of elections, this result could be the result of incorrect information from respondents who give socially acceptable answers. This is most probable with persons who have internalised the norm of voting. For Germany, using the Allbus data, it is possible to ascertain for which persons the norm of voting is most relevant. 76% of respondents placing themselves in the lower or working class support the view that voting is a civic duty. In the case of the middle class, this share rises to 87%, and with the upper class, it rises as far as 92% (Allbus 2008). In case over-reporting is a consequence of the internalised voting norm, the results as presented here must overestimate the social distortion with regard to voter turnout.

  5. This graph is based upon a logistic regression (with robust standard errors), which takes the nesting of individuals in countries into account.

  6. This point requires some qualification. With 18.879 observations made at the individual level, it is not surprising that most coefficients are significant, the standard error being smaller, the higher the number of cases. Therefore, the extent of the effect is of greater relevance than the significance (see Fig. 7).

  7. As the coefficient of the interaction term with centered variables simply shows the correlation for the middle consensus orientation, Fig. 6 shows the correlation across the whole spectrum of the Lijphart Index. For the 6 countries situated at the most concordance-democratic end of the spectrum, no statistically significant effect is evident.

  8. Naturally, high voter turnout alone does not guarantee this either. It is a pre-condition for all interests to be treated equally, but at the same time cannot guarantee that this will happen.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung, Paulstrasse 3, 50676, Köln, Germany

    Armin Schäfer

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  1. Armin Schäfer
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Correspondence to Armin Schäfer.

Additional information

An earlier version of this paper was presented in January 2009 at the symposium ‘Institutions and Processes in Comparative Perspective’ of the DVPW section ‘Comparative Politics’. My thanks to Juan Fernandez, Martin Höpner, Sebastian Karcher, Mark Lutter, Tim Müllenborn and Alexander Petring for their numerous helpful comments. Thanks also to Katharina Päffgen for her research assistance.

Appendix

Appendix

1.1 An overview of macro variables and methodologies

Table 6
Full size table

1.1.1 Data sources

1.1.2 Remarks on methodologies and individual variables

  • At the individual level, all continuous variables are centred upon the country mean, all macro variables upon the grand mean (Raudenbush and Bryk 2002, pp. 31–33)

  • Where statements have been made concerning individual countries, results are weighted according to the selection probability of respondents. Where the country group of developed western European democracies has been observed as a whole, additional weightings are included to take account of differences in population.

  • Satisfaction with democracy was measured in the ESS using a scale of between 0 (highly dissatisfied with the functioning of democracy in respondent’s own country) to 10 (highly satisfied).

  • Trust was measured on a scale of 0 (no trust whatsoever) to 10 (complete trust). Here, average values for trust in parliaments and politicians are shown. Both values correlate with Pearsons r = 0.69.

  • ‘Left-wing respondents’ is a dummy variable, ascribing the value of 1 to those respondents who on a scale of between 0 (extreme left-wing) and 10 (extreme right-wing) show values between 0 and 2.

  • ‘Loser’ is a dummy variable, used to describe respondents who at the previous election voted for a political party which ultimately failed to attain government office.

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Schäfer, A. Consequences of social inequality for democracy in Western Europe. Z Vgl Polit Wiss 6 (Suppl 2), 23–45 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12286-010-0086-6

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