Abstract
As if palpable tendencies toward mendocracy in the United States and the United Kingdom were not enough, a World Bank inequality specialist attested to the former country that it was sliding from democracy toward “plutocracy”, for it “empower[s] the rich politically to a much greater extent than the middle class or the poor” (Milanovic 2016: 194, 199). Nota bene, this was written before Donald Trump’s cabinet assumed office.
Unequal social resources, primarily income, wealth, and education, will unavoidably translate into unequal political resources with regard to participatory engagement and control over political agenda-setting, already now pushing democracy toward plutocracy. Reducing such disparities is of prime importance to ensure the accessibility, accountability, and—in the final instance—legitimacy of supposedly “representative” government. Political scientists should join leading economists such as Krugman, Piketty, and Stiglitz in urging tax reform and other policy changes.
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Notes
- 1.
A study entitled: Systematically Distorted Decisions? Responsiveness in German Politics from 1998-2015, commissioned by the German Labor and Social Affairs Ministry from the University of Osnabrueck’s Center for Research on Democracy and submitted in 2016, found a very similar pattern. Headed by Armin Schäfer, the research team analyzed (a) degrees of support within different social groups for 252 detailed survey questions posed between 1998 and 2013, covering political decisions debated at the time, and (b) whether or not, or to what degree, the policy changes addressed in these questions had been enacted by the German Federal Parliament during the next two to four years. The study’s most pertinent result deserves to be quoted in full: “Not only do German citizens with different incomes participate in politics to a very unequal degree, but there is clearly a non-level playing field, to the detriment of the poor, in political decision-making. With that, there is the threat of a vicious circle of unequal participation and unequal responsiveness: Socially disadvantaged groups may find that their concerns get no hearing, and therefore turn their backs on politics—which, consequently, may follow even more the interests of the more affluent” (Elsässer et al. 2016: 43; cf. also 9, 16 ss., 35).—Meant to be included in the German (Grand Coalition) government’s 5th Report on Poverty and Wealth, these findings were watered down or omitted following interdepartmental consultations (for a comparison, see German Federal Government 2017: 46).
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Eisfeld, R. (2019). Low Income, Inferior Education. In: Empowering Citizens, Engaging the Public. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-5928-6_8
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