Although political equality is a foundation of modern democracy, we do not know how far from equality we are. If you want to know how much economic inequality there is in your country, and its trends and dynamics over time, you can turn to the terabytes’ worth of publicly available economic data and grind them through the many inequality equations to derive a multitude of statistics. With decades of innovations in the study of economics and inequality, led by the disciplines of sociology and economics, we can, at least, have a debate over the form, duration and magnitude of economic inequality and its dynamics over time.
Political inequality refers to the unequal influence over decisions made by political bodies and the unequal outcomes of those decisions. It is a subtype of power inequality, visible within the political processes of all kinds of political structures. Unlike economic inequality, with political inequality we are far from setting the terms of the debate.
How much political inequality is there? And is political inequality rising, falling, or staying the same? The answer to these key questions requires us to specify the kind of political inequality – voice, response and their subtypes – and whether we mean equality of political opportunities or of political outcomes.
This session calls for theoretical, methodological and empirical attempts to answer the question: Is political inequality rising, falling or has it remained the same over time? Papers can examine this within nations or in cross-national perspective.
Joshua DUBROW, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
