Website for Working Group on Political Inequality

This is the website for the Working Group on Political Inequality, organized under the Committee on Political Sociology, consisting of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Political Sociology (RC 18)  and the International Political Science Association Research Committee on Political Sociology (RC 6), and affiliated with Cross-National Studies: Interdisciplinary Research and Training Program (CONSIRT).  In this website you will find what the Working Group is about, its activities, and the people involved. 

You will also find research notes: short statements on concepts, theories and empirics of political inequality; and teaching materials for use in the classroom.

Political Inequality Sessions at the International Sociological Association 2012 Second Forum of Sociology

I am organizing two sessions at the upcoming International Sociological Association Second Forum of Sociology in Buenos Aires, Argentina, August 1 – 4, 2012.

If you are interested, please submit an abstract on-line in the ISA website between August 25 and December 15, 2011.  You can also email Joshua Kjerulf Dubrow: dubrow.2@osu.edu

Here is what ISA says about grants.

For more information, please see ISA 2012 Political Inequality Sessions on this website.

Political Inequality in Latin America: A Special Issue of the International Journal of Sociology

Members of the Working Group on Political inequality have guest edited a special issue of the International Journal of Sociology, “Political Inequality in Latin America.”  The issue is now available on-line.  For the table of contents and abstracts, please click here.

Pew Study on Political Participation in America

For recent data on voice inequality with respect to non-electoral political participation, see  The Internet and Civic Engagement Sep 1, 2009 by Aaron Smith, Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, Henry Brady, a Pew research study.

Cross-National Measures of Political inequality of Voice

Dubrow, Joshua Kjerulf.  2010.  “Cross-National Measures of Political Inequality of Voice.”  ASK: Research and Methods 19: 93-110.

ABSTRACT

Social scientists have long argued that political power is a key dimension of stratification, yet few empirically analyze political inequality or explicitly discuss the methodological implications of their measures of it. Political inequality is a distinct dimension of social stratification and a form of power inequality whose domain is all things related to political processes.  It is a multidimensional concept – comprised of voice, response, and policy – that occurs in all types of governance structures.  Conceptions of political inequality of voice reflect the well-established finding that position within the social and political structure impacts individual and group political influence. I argue that definitions and measures of political inequality of voice should focus on the extent of influence given its connection, but not reduction, to economic resources.  This article proposes and evaluates cross-national structural measures of political inequality of voice based on the relationship between socioeconomic status and political participation.  I explore the relationships between the measures and the rankings of European countries using data from the European Social Survey 2008 and the Economist Intelligence Unit Index of Democracy 2008’s “political participation” category.

Does the Internet Reduce Political Inequality of Voice?

Not yet and not in America, according to a recent article in Perspectives on Politics:

Perspectives on Politics, Volume 8, issue 2 (June 2010), p. 487-509

Weapon of the Strong? Participatory Inequality and the Internet

Schlozman, Kay Lehman; Verba, Sidney; Brady, Henry E

What is the impact of the possibility of political participation on the Internet on long-standing patterns of participatory inequality in American politics? An August 2008 representative survey of Americans conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project provides little evidence that there has been any change in the extent to which political participation is stratified by socio-economic status, but it suggests that the web has ameliorated the well-known participatory deficit among those who have just joined the electorate. Even when only that subset of the population with Internet access is considered, participatory acts such as contributing to candidates, contacting officials, signing a political petition, or communicating with political groups are as stratified socio-economically when done on the web as when done offline. The story is different for stratification by age where historically younger people have been less engaged than older people in most forms of political participation. Young adults are much more likely than their elders to be comfortable with electronic technologies and to use the Internet, but among Internet users, the young are not especially politically active. How these trends play out in the future depends on what happens to the current Web-savvy younger generation and the cohorts that follow and on the rapidly developing political capacities of the Web. Stay logged on …

Statement on the Study of Political Inequality

Social scientists have long argued that political power is a key dimension of stratification (Weber 1946; Lenski 1966; Dahl 2006), yet few empirically analyze political inequality (Winters and Page 2009).   Although attention to global inequality has increased in the social stratification literature, most examine income (Firebaugh 1999; Milanovic 2002; Neckerman and Torche 2007), some examine health (Goselin and Firebaugh 2004), and almost none examine political influence (Anderson and Beramendi 2008).  Most discussions of political inequality consist of philosophical debates over whether political equality is possible, or even necessary (Verba 2006; Bohman 1999; Dahl 2006; Ware 1981).  The few empirical discussions neither explicitly discuss the methodological implications of their measures of political inequality nor discuss how they can be applied cross-nationally (Winters and Page 2009; Anderson and Beramendi 2008).  This is a huge gap in our knowledge of how modern societies work.

This brief statement has three parts.  First, I present many definitions of political inequality, and argue each implies a distinct empirical measure.  Second, I suggest some empirical measures of political inequality.  Third, I offer a sketch of the field of political inequality.

Notes on Winters and Page’s (2009) “Oligarchy in the U.S.?”

Winters, Jeffrey A. and Benjamin I. Page.  2009.  “Oligarchy in the United States?”  Perspectives on Politics 7(4): 731 – 751.
 

What the Article Is About
Winters and Page (Hereafter, WP) argue that all modern democracies, regardless of level of democracy, can be oligarchies.   Oligarchy and democracy can, and do, “coexist comfortably” (731).  WP ask whether the U.S. is an oligarchy.

WP want to “advance the research agenda” of the APSA Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy, and goad political scientists to “treat power… more seriously” (732).

Political Inequality Sessions at International Sociological Association 2010

I am organizing a general theme on political inequality for RC 18: Political Sociology at the World Congress of the International Sociological Association 2010 in Gothenburg, Sweden.  Here is a link to the RC18 website’s call for papers.  If you’re interested in the study of political inequality, please submit a paper to me by December 15, 2009.

General Theme n 4: Political Inequality in Cross-National Perspective
(Convener: Joshua Kjerulf Dubrow, Polish Academy of Sciences, dubrow.2@osu.edu)

Political inequality is the extent to which groups within society differ in influence over government decisions. Decades of research have clearly shown how position within the social structure impacts individual- and group-level political influence, such that political inequality interacts with a host of other inequalities, including those of gender, ethnicity, and class. Because political processes govern resource distribution, political inequality has profound consequences for the welfare of all people within society.

This general theme focuses on political inequality as a distinctive form of inequality and aims to examine methodological and substantive issues pertaining to it. While there are many clear definitions and well-established measures of other major types of inequality — e.g. economic and educational inequalities — that enable researchers to address basic empirical questions of, “how unequal is society?” and “what are the causes and consequences of this inequality?” there are few attempts to directly measure political inequality. As a result, crucial questions remain unaddressed.

Continuing the discussions initiated in the International Journal of Sociology special issue on “Causes and Consequences of Political Inequality in Cross-National Perspective” (2008), and inspired by the American Political Science Association’s “Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy,” this general theme seeks methodological, quantitative, and qualitative empirical papers that bridge sociology and political science to address crucial questions regarding political inequality in cross-national perspective.

There are two main sessions planned for this theme. Paper proposals with abstracts should be sent to: Joshua Kjerulf Dubrow, dubrow.2@osu.edu, by December 15, 2009.

Session 1: Consequences of Political Inequality
Papers in this session should address the question: What are the consequences of political inequality on peoples, societies and social structures? If political inequality is a distinctive form of inequality in its own right, consequences of its existence and durability must be demonstrated. Papers in this session should empirically examine how political inequality matters in the lives of disadvantaged groups, for the long-term health of democratic governance, for particular political policies and legislation, or for the establishment and durability of civil society and social movements.

Session 4: Measurement and Causality
Papers in this session should address one or more of the following questions: (a) How do we define and measure political inequality? (b) How politically unequal are modern democracies? and (c) What causes political inequality? From Pitirim Sorokin to Robert Dahl to Amartya Sen, among others, there is a strong theoretical base on which to support the contention that political inequality is a distinctive form of inequality as important as that of economic inequality. Yet, there is very little empirical work on how to operationalize its concepts, measure its extent, and identify its roots. Papers with a cross-national perspective should empirically examine forms of political inequality – such as underrepresentation of disadvantaged groups in government and unequal political participation, to name a couple – including how these forms endure over time and across societies, how they combine, or how they interact with other major forms of social inequality.

Intersectionality and Political Inequality

I created a website that is a companion to a recently published paper on intersectionality and political participation.  The abstract is as follows:

Dubrow, Joshua Kjerulf.  2008.  “How Can We Account for Intersectionality in Quantitative Analysis of Survey Data?  Empirical Illustration of Central and Eastern Europe.”  ASK: Society, Research, Methods 17: 85-102.

 

ABSTRACT

 

While applying intersectionality is common in the qualitative literature, there are few methodological guides for the quantitative researcher.  I examine the challenges of incorporating intersectionality into quantitative survey analysis by comparing and contrasting statistical approaches in the analysis of the influence of intersectional demographics. To illustrate these approaches I use European Social Survey (2006) data and focus on gender, ethnicity, and class and their intersections to explain soft political protest in Central and East European countries. Logistic regression equations with dichotomous explanatory variables, including multiplicative interaction terms and their main effects, allow for testing variants of intersectionality theory and hypotheses testing cumulative disadvantage.  Some main guidelines for the cross-national quantitative analysis of intersectionality are: (1) multiplicative interaction terms are the best way to measure intersections and account for their properties as being beyond the sum of their parts; (2) care must be taken with the interpretation of main effects and higher and lower order interaction terms; and (3) each intersection has time and space specific consequences. In advocating for widespread use of quantitative techniques to analyze demographic intersections, large survey data sets, especially cross-national ones, provide opportunities for intersectionality researchers to provide empirical support for their theoretical statements and generalizability of their findings.