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.

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.

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 …

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

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.

Definitions of Political Inequality

Although much discussed, few explicitly define political inequality. In all conceptualizations, no matter how vague, political inequality is a matter of who makes the decisions in decision-making bodies.  At root, all conceptions reflect the well-established finding that position within the social structure impacts individual and group political influence (Verba et al 1978; APSA 2004). 

Consider three definitions.  One is by Sorokin (1959 [1927]): political inequality is the existence of authority divisions.  This rather broad definition implies that political inequality is the existence of two or more groups with unequal political input into the decisions that affect them. If existence of authority divisions is the form political inequality takes, then the verticality of the authority structure, i.e the distance between the masses and the decision makers, is its magnitude: the more layers of authority between the citizen and the decision, the greater the political inequality.  There are two main problems with operationalizing this definition.  First, it assumes the theoretical existence of a situation that never was: a totally flattened authority structure, i.e. no authority divisions whatsoever, where all groups would have equal say in legislation and policy. Second, to measure political inequality in this way, we would need to interpret and compare the organizational charts of governments around the world, a daunting and potentially fruitless task.

[Footnote: Sorokin refers to political inequality as "political stratification."  Sorokin is among the first, if not the first, scholar to suggest that political inequality is a distinct dimension of social stratification.]

Another and more plausible definition is the political resource approach: political inequality is structured differences in the distribution and acquisition of political resources.  Here, political resources are said to be similar to other stratification resources, such as economic or status, and that one group has more or less of these resources than another group (see also Ware 1981: 393).  See also the discussion on Winters & Page (2009).

However, the political resource approach is problematic for a few reasons.  Dahl (2006) argues that cross-national measure of political inequality is impossible: “…to estimate gains and losses in political equality we lack cardinal measures that would allow us to say, for example, that “political equality is twice as great in country X as in country Y.”  At best we must rely on ordinal measures based on judgments about ‘more,’ ‘less,’ ‘about the same,’ and the like” (78).  This is based on the assumption that political inequality must be understood as unequal distribution in political resources. A political resource is potentially anything that is applied in a political situation in the process of influencing a decision: it can be a social thing — material, ideational, a personal attribute, a group level attribute, an authority position, a network connection — or an action, such as political participation.  If anything can be used as a political resource, it is problematic to find a measure of political resources that conforms to all contexts and is functionally equivalent across nations. 

[Footnote:  Dahl (1996) defines political resources as “almost anything “– including money, reputation, legal status, social capital and knowledge, to name a few -- that has value and can be used to achieve political ends.  This is akin to power resource approach: “from this perspective, power resources are the attributes or things that one actor can use to coerce or induce another actor… almost everyone has something that can be used to influence somebody” (Piven and Cloward 2005: 37).]

A third approach is adapted from Piven and Cloward’s (2005) interdependency approach to power relations.  It argues that political inequality is the extent to which groups within society differ in their influence over government decisions.  In this approach, political influence is understood as the range of actions an actor can take within a political interaction.  Actions used to influence governments are context dependent: they must be appropriate to the task at hand.  The characteristics of the relationship between the interacting groups reveal possible (political power) actions.  For example, in communist-era Poland, political connections were more formidable resources than money in influencing political officials.  The protest tactics of the non-violent Solidarity movement was able to influence government in a way that, at that point, an assault with conventional weapons could not.  Unlike the previous two approaches, where it can be imagined that one group can possess all of the “political resources,” manifesting as a dichotomy where 1= political influence, and 0 = no political influence, in this third definition groups are defined by their extent of political influence. 

In my view, political inequality cannot be defined by the mere existence of disadvantage in the political sphere.  Rather, the focus must be on the political influence gap, or distance, between groups.  To note that those with low amounts of economic resources tend not to participate is not enough.  We need to know how the gap between rich and poor impacts the size of the gap between the politically powerful and the politically less powerful.

Measures of Political Inequality

Previous empirical studies have measured political inequality in three ways, each with shortcomings.  The first is in terms of social concentrations occupying strategic political positions where some groups are on the winning side of political competitions more often than others.  This “concentrations” conception of political inequality has been measured as concentration of power (Acemoglu et al 2007) and descriptive representation (Griffin and Keane 2006).  There are two problems.  First, political concentration measures underestimate the degree of influence ordinary citizens have (Piven and Cloward 2005).  Second, descriptive representation measures in and of themselves fail to account for whether descriptive representatives are actually concerned with acting in accordance with their role (Dubrow 2006). 

The second is in terms of actions individuals and groups take to achieve political decisions favorable to them.  Previous “actions” measures include, less directly, psychological engagement with politics (Solt 2008) and, more directly, voter turnout (Anderson and Beramendi 2008).  This, too, has problems.  Psychological engagement such as knowledge and attitudes toward politics are preconditions for political action, but attitudinal measures are not substitutes for measures of citizen behavior.  Voter turnout is an important aspect, but there are four problems with using it in and of itself as a measure of political inequality.  First, influence of voting on government decisions depends on the choices offered in the political market:  If voters are faced with parties and candidates who have little interest in reducing inequalities, then voting itself will not make change.  Second, voter turnout assumes that all people vote.  In reality, the advantaged tend to vote more than the disadvantaged.  Third, those who cannot vote, i.e. the disenfranchised, are not accounted for.  Voting is often over-reported in surveys, making them somewhat unreliable guides for the extent of citizen engagement.  Even when official statistics are used, voting in Europe is such a common occurrence with little effort – in some places mandatory — and indirect consequence that it over-estimates the degree of political equality in citizen voice. 

The third type is an accounting of which groups tend to have more political decisions that are favorable to them.  “Outcomes” measures are rare. Bartels’ (2002) study of public opinion and roll-call voting that suggests that government is more responsive to higher level income groups is remarkable in this regard (see also Gilens 2005). While outcome measures are potentially the best, complexity in policy outcomes can be hard to handle; who the winning group(s) are in policy decisions is often not clear, forcing some contestable decisions on the part of the researcher.

There are two key issues in measuring political inequality.  The first is how to measure influence.  Political influence is notoriously difficult to measure as it is an interaction process that is more inferred from conditions, actions and outcomes than directly observed (see Dahl 2006: Chapter 6).  The second is that inequality must be understood as the distance between two groups, i.e. “to distinguish perfect equality from a state of inequality” (Allison 1979: 865).  To address these issues, a contrast with income inequality is useful.  Income inequality is often measured by the extent of the distance between those with a lot of income and those with less.  Here, political inequality is the extent of the distance between those with a lot of potential influence and those with less.  Unlike income, we do not actually see the influence, and we can only infer it from its outcome.  In cross-national perspective, this is further complicated by needing a measure that is functionally equivalent across nations.   
The APSA Task Force in 2004 identified three interrelated conceptual foci around which political inequality revolves: citizen voice, government responsiveness, and patterns of public policy making. Citizen voice refers to the representation of social groups in governance bodies and their political participation; government responsiveness includes the extent to which governance bodies listen and react to citizen voice; public policy making is manifest in the thought and deeds (e.g. legislation) of the government. The upshot is that the disadvantaged are less involved in political participation, government officials are less inclined to be responsive to the preferences of the disadvantaged and public policy fails to address the needs of the disadvantaged. 

Useful measures of political inequality can be based on the concept of citizen voice, i.e. conventional political participation. Conventional political participation refers here to the lawful activities citizens do to influence government decisions in legislation and policy.  Political participation arose out of the relationship between state and masses, where masses attempt to be heard in ways that are not directly accessible to them.  In his 1996 APSA presidential address, Lijphart warned that “unequal participation spells unequal influence . . . the inequality in representation and influence are not randomly distributed but systematically biased in favor of more privileged citizens” (1997: 1).  If political participation influences government decisions, then legislation and policy tend to reflect the interests of those who are the most active. 

One way to measure political inequality is by a simple percentage of those who participate and those who do not.  This is a measure of the spread of political influence over the entire population: a large proportion of political participation would mean that political influence is more widespread, a smaller one the opposite.

While this measure does address some aspect of political inequality, ultimately it fails to account for how political inequality of voice often functions in modern societies: political inequality is largely based on the connection between socioeconomic resources and political participation.  Classic and contemporary theories suggest that political influence is intertwined with economic privilege (Lenski 1966; Weber 1946).  Weber argued that political power stemmed from the organization of interests into parties.  This political organizational aspect of social life called “parties” consists of class or status situations, and thus products of the economic and social orders, respectively.  As party composition is determined by the structure of domination within the community, in modern capitalist societies, where the economic situation is dominant, parties are intimately connected to the economic order.  Borrowing from Weber, Lenski (1966: 318) argued that political regimes have the ability to influence the distribution of scarce and valued resources, along with the outcomes of this struggle.  Modern industrial society has lower inequality because democracy distributes power more equitably.  In market societies, according to Lenski, political power is a function of wealth (229).  The most consistent finding in the political participation literature is that the economically advantaged, more privileged members of society tend to participate more than the disadvantaged (Verba et al 1978; see also Gallego 2008). Thus, in Europe conventional political participation and economic resources can be combined to form a valid measure of political influence.  It is expected that countries differ in the way they combine political with socioeconomic resources, with some countries having a stronger economic tie to political participation than others.  Yet, we should allow for the distinctions between economic and political resources; for example, gender and politics is not always about economics, but rather the enduring and unequal status distinctions between men and women manifested in societies dating back to antiquity.

The Field of Political Inequality: A Sketch with Possibilities

I now offer a brief sketch of the field of political inequality.  Most of this is speculation: to date, there is no defined field of political inequality; rather, there exists a disorganized collection of theoretical and empirical studies where the term “political inequality” or, at least, its spirit, is invoked.  My thoughts on what unites political inequality as a field of study are still forming.  I am hoping that the discussions in the “Political Inequality in Cross-National Perspective” sessions of the 2010 International Sociological Association meetings in Sweden will help me, and others, think more systematically and coherently about what the field of political inequality is, and could be.

I would like to reiterate what I (briefly) wrote about this matter in the guest editor’s introduction to the 2008 International Journal of Sociology special issue, “Causes and Consequences of Political Inequality in Cross-National Perspective.”

Although political inequality has been at the center of generations of social science research, key issues remain that have not been satisfactorily addressed. One reason for this is that political inequality lacks coherence as a field of study. Contrast it with voting behavior, income inequality, and social movements, all of which have a long literature and well-developed measures and theories; political inequality has the unenviable task of uniting all of these elements into coherent models that explain its causes and consequences. The APSA Task Force has helped to define the field of political inequality by providing a vocabulary (voice, responsiveness, and policy) and some suggestions for building empirically testable theoretical models.

The challenge of building a field of political inequality is to unite the vast knowledge we have about social stratification – its theories, its empirical research, its methodology – with the vast knowledge we have about politics found in political science and political sociology. 

To do this, as Sorokin (1959 [1927]) suggested, we must first recognize that political inequality is a distinct dimension of stratification (at this point, I am not making use of the difference between inequality and stratification).  This means that in theory or in operationalization of its concepts, political inequality cannot be reduced to economic or status inequalities.  It cannot be reduced to gender, race and ethnic, or class inequalities.  Empirical research should treat political inequality as an analytically distinct form of stratification, and push those analyses as far as they will go.  For example, instead of assuming that economic resources equal political resources, we should try to understand the extent to which they are separate, and in what contexts their differences and similarities are most prominent. In sum, the way we approach economic inequality, or status inequality, should be the same way we approach political inequality.  Find the boundaries, and we find the field of political inequality.

Next, the more difficult step is to synthesize theories and empirical research of what many call, in an unsystematic fashion, political inequality.  Political inequality is just one of many, conceptually related fields that would benefit from some coherence.  In their 2010 Annual Review of Political Science article, Jacobs and Soss argue that the understanding of the relationship between democracy and economic systems should fall under a coherent study of “political economy.”  Their first two paragraphs under the subheading “Toward a Coherent Research Agenda on the Politics of Inequality,” though focused on the American case, could be applied here (though I take exception to the implications of that subheading, which implies that what they are studying is political inequality, as even they clearly state that their topic of interest is limited to the relationship between polity and economy) (Jacobs and Soss 2010: 358). 

Next, there is a need to mobilize and organize scholars interested in political inequality.  Besides the 2008 IJS issue, the 2010 ISA political inequality sessions are an attempt to do just that.  Even the few papers I received thus far are indicative of a heavily fragmented field.  While it is good to celebrate the virtues of fragmentation – diversity of thought produces useful knowledge, eventually – we should also appreciate the need for coherence. 

References

Acemoglu, Daron, Mar´ıa Ang´elica Bautista, Pablo Querub´ın, and James A. Robinson.  2007.  “Economic and Political Inequality in Development: The Case of Cundinamarca, Colombia.”  http://econ-www.mit.edu/files/222.   (accessed April 9, 2008) 

Allison, Paul D.  1979. “Measures of Inequality.”  American Sociological Review 43: 865-880.

Anderson, Christopher J. and Pablo Beramendi.  2008.  “Income, Inequality, and Electoral Participation.” Pp.  278-311 in Democracy, Inequality, and Representation: A Comparative Perspective edited by Pablo Beramendi and Christopher J. Anderson. Russell Sage Foundation.

APSA Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy.  2004.  American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality.  www.apsanet.org/imgtest/taskforcereport.pdf.  (accessed July 4, 2007)

Berhagen, Patrick and Michael Marsh.  2007.  “Voting and Protesting: Explaining Citizen Participation in Old and New European Democracies”  Democratization 14(1): 44-72.

Bohman, James.  1999.  “International Regimes and Democratic Governance: Political Equality and Governance in Global Institutions.” International Affairs 75(3): 499-513.

Dahl, Robert A.  2006.  On Political Equality.  New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Dubrow, Joshua Kjerulf. 2008.  “Guest Editor’s Introduction: Defining Political Inequality with a Cross-National Perspective.”  International Journal of Sociology, Special Issue: Causes and Consequences of Political Inequality in Cross-National Perspective 37 (4): 3 – 9.

Dubrow, Joshua Kjerulf, Kazimierz M. Slomczynski and Irina Tomescu-Dubrow.  2008.  “Effects of Democracy and Inequality on Soft Political-Protest in Europe: Exploring the European Social Survey Data.”  International Journal of Sociology 38(3): 36 – 51.

Ekiert, Grzegorz, and Jan Kubik. 1998. “Contentious Politics in New Democracies: East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, 1989–93.” World Politics 50: 547–81.

Firebaugh, Glenn. 1999. “Empirics of World Income Inequality.” American Journal of Sociology 104: 1597-1630.

Gallego, Aina.  2008.  “Unequal Political Participation in Europe.”  International Journal of Sociology 37 (4): 10 – 26.

Gilens, Martin.  2005.  “Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness.”  Public Opinion Quarterly 69(5): 778-796.

Griffin, John D. and Michael Keane. 2006. “Descriptive Representation and the Composition of African American Turnout.”  American Journal of Political Science 50(4): 998 – 1012.

Jacobs, Lawrence R. and Joe Soss.  2010.  “The Politics of Inequality in America: A Political Economy Framework.”  Annual Review of Political Science 13: 341-364.

Kekic, Laza. 2007. Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index. Available at www.economist.com/media/pdf/DEMOCRACY_INDEX_2007_v3.pdf (accessed May 1, 2008).

Milanovic, Branko. 2002.  “True World Income Distribution, 1988 and 1993: First Calculation Based on Household Surveys Alone.”  The Economic Journal 112:51-
92.

Neckerman, Kathryn M. and Florencia Torche.  2007.  “Inequality: Causes and Consequences.”  Annual Review of Sociology 33: 335-357.

Piven, Frances Fox and Richard A. Cloward.  2005.  “Rule Making, Rule Breaking, and Power” pp. 33 – 53 in The Handbook of Political Sociology: States, Civil Societies, and Globalization edited by Thomas Janoski, Robert Alford, Alexander Hicks, and Mildred A. Schwartz.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Schlozman, Kay L., Benjamin I. Paige, Sidney Verba and Morris Fiorina.  2004.  “Inequalities of Political Voice.”  Subcommittee report of the American Political Science Association Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy.  http://www.apsanet.org/imgtest/voicememo.pdf  (accessed July 4, 2007).

Solt, Frederick.  2008.  “Economic Inequality and Democratic Political Engagement.”  American Journal of Political Science 52(1): 48-60. 

Sorokin, Pitirim.  1959 [1927].  Social Mobility.  New York: Free Press.

Szabó, Máté. 1996. “Repertoires of Contention in Post-Communist Protest Cultures: An East Central European Comparative Survey.” Social Research: An International Quarterly of the Social Sciences 63(4): 156–80.

Tilly, Charles. 2006. Regimes and Repertoires. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Verba, Sidney.  2006.  “Fairness, Equality and Democracy: Three Big Words.”  Social Research 73(2)499-540.

Verba, Sidney, N.H. Nie and J. Kim. 1978. Participation and Political Equality: A Seven-Nation Comparison. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ware, Alan.  1981.  “The Concept of Political Equality: A Post-Dahl Analysis.”  Political Studies 29(3): 393-406. 

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).

Defining Oligarchy
Citing Aristotle, WP argue that wealth is the primary power resource.  WP define oligarchy as a “type of political system” in which “the wealthiest citizens deploy unique and concentrated power resources to defend their unique minority interests” (731).  WP argue that oligarchy is a form of extreme political and economic inequality: “Oligarchy refers broadly to extreme political inequalities that necessarily accompany extreme material inequalities” (732).  Oligarchs, due to their wealth, are a powerful minority that dominates policy in modern democracy. 

Why wealth?  Wealth is “a material form of power that is distinct from all other power resources, and which can be readily deployed for political purposes” (732).  (Material, as opposed to other types of) wealth is an individual power resource for three main reasons: (1) It is concentrated in the hands of the few; (2) it is easily used as a means of political influence; and (3) it implies a set of political interests: specifically, the desire to protect the wealth they have and get more of it.  The core political interest is in property and income defense.  Concentrated wealth is both power and a motivation to use power.  WP acknowledge other sources of political power: position within government, full political citizenship, position within organizations, personal capacity to mobilize people, and access to the means of violence.  In their view, wealth is the most consistent major political power source.

WP acknowledge that oligarchs do not control all political life: just the major ones concerning property and income.  Oligarchs do not have to exhibit “explicit coordination or cohesion” (731).  Their common interest in wealth protection is enough to bind them and coordinate their actions.  This common interest also insulates the oligarchal system from radical changes resulting from circulation of elites. 

How do oligarchs use wealth?  Wealth is a gateway to purchasing the means of control and furthering their political interests.  They command large organizations.  They hire “armies” of skilled professionals.  They are “denizens of foundations, think tanks, politically connected law firms, consultancies, and lobbying organizations” (732). Oligarchs do not have to have extensive engagement in political participation to be oligarchs.  They argue that oligarchs do not have to hold formal government positions to wield power: rather, “indirect influence is sufficient” (731). 

Masses do not rebel against this state of affairs because of a stable “oligarch-mass” settlement.  In exchange for extreme inequality, masses receive universal suffrage.  The masses are divided in terms of their interests.  Oligarchs operate within a — limited — pluralistic environment. 

WP argue that oligarchy became a muddled concept in the hands of the classic elite theorists of Mosca, Pareto and Michels, who included resources other than wealth in their lists of what constitutes power resources for oligarchs.
  

How They Measure Individual Political Power
WP argue that there are many possible political power measures, and they encourage empirical investigation into them.  Their measure of political power is based on indices of income and wealth.  They note (endnote 21) that income and wealth does not necessarily have a 1:1 relationship with political power, such that twice the wealth equals twice the political power.  They argue that such relationships are open for empirical investigation.  Yet, in Table 1, this is exactly how they calculate “individual power index.” 

“The Individual Power Index for each income fractile is a ratio, calculated as the average income for that fractile divided by the average income of the bottom 90%” (735, Table 1).

Individuals in the top 1/100 of 1% with an average income of over 25 million dollars have 882.8 times as much “individual power” as an individual in the bottom 90%.  Due to this form of calculation, the bottom 90% will always have an individual power index score of 1.

WP also measure individual power based on the wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans and distributions based on estate tax and data from the Survey of Consumer Finances.

They do not have a threshold at which a certain level of political power (based on income or wealth) is oligarchy: “Any fixed quantitative criterion used to identify oligarchs is bound to be arbitrary… we would argue strongly against any mechanical rule” (737).  Yet, they argue that in the U.S., “a definitional boundary that identifies the top tenth of 1 percent of the wealthiest households as potential oligarchs seems fairly plausible” (738).
  

What Oligarchs Control
Oligarchs do not control all policy.  Rather, they control key policies that offer the best wealth protection.
Policy types that oligarchs exert over-influence are:
(a)  International economic policy (important for a globalizing world)
(b)  Monetary policy (important during economic crisis)
(c)  Tax policy (which influences government spending and other government budgetary matters)
(d)  Over-all redistributive impact of all government policies.
  

How Oligarchs Exert Control
(a)  Lobbying (which has got more professional and more expensive)
(b)  Elections (campaign contributions influence who gets elected to office)
(c)  Opinion shaping (media and more subtle ways that they do not specify)
(d)  constitutional rules (including the appointment of judges)
  

Critiques:
This is an interesting a provacative article.  I especially appreciate their attempt to measure political power.  I have some criticisms of their approach.

They do not consistently distinguish between “power” resources and “political” resources.  They refer mostly to political power, but their vocabulary is not precisely deployed.

Though they reference Aristotle in their claim that wealth is the primary power resource in democracies for oligarchs, they do not explicitly reference the deep roots their ideas have in Marxism and neo-Marxism.  Their thesis of why the masses accept this arrangement is very close to the Marxian theory of state compromise/class compromise.  In exchange for their larger monetary and political control, the ruling class grants concessions to the proletariat, including limited political influence and limited economic redistribution. 

Further, WP argue that masses are “persuaded” as a result of this settlement.  In Marxian terms, the settlement leads to false consciousness (they do not use the term “consciousness”).  Lacking wealth as a motivator for political action, masses are divided over their different interests.  This implies that wealth is the only thing in modern democracy that can successfully bind a group together and motivate each individual to act as if they have a common interest with their fellow group members. 

In their discussion of how wealth is used, they do not separate ownership from control over organizations.  For example, WP states that “the wealthy often control large organizations, such as business corporations, that can act for them” (732).  CEOs and boards of directors are the ones that usually control these organizations; while they are wealthy, it is not their material wealth that is used; rather, it is their position within a heavily resourced organization.  This fact undermines their argument that wealth is the key political force.  A similar problem is with oligarchs relationship to think tanks, lobbying firms, and the like.  While funded by the wealthy, even the non-wealthy can be influential actors within these organizations.  These problems in their conceptualization are especially problematic because they operationalize political power solely on income and wealth indices.

While WP say that oligarchs do not control all political activities, their last form of control, “Over-all redistributive impact of all government policies” is vague enough to imply a much larger range of control than WP admit.  “Over-all” is far too imprecise to be operationalized.

What happens to WP ‘s theory when placed in a communist regime?  There, position within the state is more of a political power resource than wealth.  Clearly, the “wealth is most important” argument does not work there.  They do not discuss communist societies (which is understandable, if they concentrate only on putative democracies).

WP do not engage directly with the problem that oligarch influence is not directly observed.  They should do more to acknowledge that, in all such similar theories, influence is inferred, not explicitly seen.  This invisible hand argument has been troublesome for all elite theories.  Further, while they cite Domhoff and Mills (but not Parenti, surprisingly), they do not engage directly with their very similar theories.  Domhoff’s “upper class as ruling class” elite theory is substantively similar to WP’s oligarchy.

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.