The empirical starting point for anyone who wants to understand political cleavages in the democratic world, based on a unique dataset covering fifty countries since WWII. Who votes for whom and why? Why has growing inequality in many parts of the world not led to renewed class-based conflicts, seeming instead to have come with the emergence of new divides over identity and integration? News analysts, scholars, and citizens interested in exploring those questions inevitably lack relevant data, in particular the kinds of data that establish historical and international context. Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities provides the missing empirical background, collecting and examining a treasure trove of information on the dynamics of polarization in modern democracies. The chapters draw on a unique set of surveys conducted between 1948 and 2020 in fifty countries on five continents, analyzing the links between votersÕ political preferences and socioeconomic characteristics, such as income, education, wealth, occupation, religion, ethnicity, age, and gender. This analysis sheds new light on how political movements succeed in coalescing multiple interests and identities in contemporary democracies. It also helps us understand the conditions under which conflicts over inequality become politically salient, as well as the similarities and constraints of voters supporting ethnonationalist politicians like Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump. Bringing together cutting-edge data and historical analysis, editors Amory Gethin, Clara Mart’nez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty offer a vital resource for understanding the voting patterns of the present and the likely sources of future political conflict.

This book analyzes the link between economic and political inequalities and investigates the mechanisms that lead to economically rooted inequalities in the political representation of citizens’ policy preferences. Focusing on the case of Switzerland and evaluating data from the post-electoral survey, Selects 2007, the author demonstrates that the policy preferences of members of the Federal Assembly best reflect those of rich citizens. This pattern is explained by differential levels of political participation and knowledge across income groups, party finance, the fact that representatives tend to come from higher economic strata, and the failure of the party-system structure to reflect the complexity of policy preferences among citizens.

At a time when political representation can be said to be facing its ultimate crisis, this crucial work clarifies the terms of the debate, providing an up-to date analysis of the main conceptual and institutional controversies that have arisen surrounding this topic. Written by leading scholars in the field, contributions focus on how representation is conceptualised and its relation to democracy.

This book sheds new light on gender-based inequalities in a globalized world. Interdisciplinary in scope, it reveals new avenues of research on gendered citizenship, analysing the possibilities and pitfalls of being represented and of representing someone. Drawing on contexts both historical and contemporary, it queries what it means to have access to representation, which power structures regulate and produce representation, and who counts as a citizen. Situating its arguments in the global struggle for hegemony, it answers such thought-provoking questions as whether one can represent someone or be represented without recourse to citizenship and, conversely, whether it is possible to be a citizen if one does not have access to representation. This engaging edited collection will appeal to students and scholars of sociology, social anthropology, history, media studies, political science, literature, gender studies and cultural studies.div div>

This is the first book in English to present a comprehensive analysis of the October 2019 social outbreak in Chile and its consequences for the country’s political system. For almost 30 years (1990-2019), Chile was recognized as a model of political and economic stability in Latin America, but the 2019 protests put into question the whole structure of representation based on programmatic political parties. This contributed volume analyzes the causes of the social outbreak by examining the interaction between political parties and social movements in Chile since 2000, establishing bridges between the sociology of social movements and the political science of parties and forms of traditional political representation. The book is organized in three parts. The first part analyzes the collapse of the political party system in Chile. The second part shows how social movements introduced innovative forms of political mobilization that challenged the traditional forms of political representation. Finally, the third part presents case studies focusing on specific social movements and their contributions to the renewal of political representation in Chile. The Social Outburst and Political Representation in Chile will be a valuable resource for sociologists, political scientists and other social scientists interested in understanding the challenges posed to political parties and institutions by social movements formed by citizens who no longer see themselves represented by the traditional forms political participation.

The eleventh edition of Social Inequality: Forms, Causes, and Consequences is an introduction to the study of social inequality. Fully updated statistics and examples convey the pervasiveness and extent of social inequality in the United States. The authors use an intersectional perspective to show how inequality occurs, how it affects all of us, and what is being done about it. With more resources and supplementary examples, exercises, and applications embedded throughout to aid students’ learning and visualization of important concepts, the book provides a rich theoretical treatment to address the current state of inequality. In line with current affairs, the authors have expanded the content to include: An intersectional approach throughout the chapters A stronger emphasis on the connections between poverty, wealth, and income inequality New case studies on the opioid epidemic, COVID-19, the lead poisoning crisis, and climate change A new focus on the rise of right-wing movements. With additional content and classroom extensions available online for instructors, Social Inequality remains an ideal and invaluable overview of the subject and provides undergraduate students with a robust understanding of social inequality from a sociological perspective.

Inequality in income, earnings, and wealth has risen dramatically in the United States over the past three decades. Most research into this issue has focused on the causes—global trade, new technology, and economic policy—rather than the consequences of inequality. In Social Inequality, a group of the nation's leading social scientists opens a wide-ranging inquiry into the social implications of rising economic inequality. Beginning with a critical evaluation of the existing research, they assess whether the recent run-up in economic inequality has been accompanied by rising inequality in social domains such as the quality of family and neighborhood life, equal access to education and health care, job satisfaction, and political participation. Marcia Meyers and colleagues find that many low-income mothers cannot afford market-based child care, which contributes to inequality both at the present time—by reducing maternal employment and family income—and through the long-term consequences of informal or low-quality care on children's educational achievement. At the other end of the educational spectrum, Thomas Kane links the growing inequality in college attendance to rising tuition and cuts in financial aid. Neil Fligstein and Taek-Jin Shin show how both job security and job satisfaction have decreased for low-wage workers compared with their higher-paid counterparts. Those who fall behind economically may also suffer diminished access to essential social resources like health care. John Mullahy, Stephanie Robert, and Barbara Wolfe discuss why higher inequality may lead to poorer health: wider inequality might mean increased stress-related ailments for the poor, and it might also be associated with public health care policies that favor the privileged. On the political front, Richard Freeman concludes that political participation has become more stratified as incomes have become more unequal. Workers at the bottom of the income scale may simply be too hard-pressed or too demoralized to care about political participation. Social Inequality concludes with a comprehensive section on the methodological problems involved in disentangling the effects of inequality from other economic factors, which will be of great benefit to future investigators. While today's widening inequality may be a temporary episode, the danger is that the current economic divisions may set in motion a self-perpetuating cycle of social disadvantage. The most comprehensive review of this quandary to date, Social Inequality maps out a new agenda for research on inequality in America with important implications for public policy.

Millions of enfranchised people live in abject poverty in democracies around the world. Yet in representative democracies, the success or failure of political parties rests on their ability to effectively engage voters. In today's highly unequal and individualized societies, the diversity of voters along socioeconomic, religious, and other lines presents an obstacle for parties vying for electoral success. How, then, can widespread, crushing poverty still exist in stable democracies, if every citizen has a vote? Two wildly different parties, Chile's right-wing UDI and Uruguay's left-wing Frente Amplio, have achieved stunning victories in this supposedly inhospitable political landscape. They have done so by simultaneously segmenting and strategically harmonizing their linkages to distinct cross-sections of voters in each society. While that electoral strategy makes for a winning hand for parties in fragmented modern societies, it perpetuates the gross inequalities that characterize the social, political, and economic landscapes of the developing democratic world. This book develops a new analytical and conceptual framework to unveil and explain segmented representation, revealing new implications for democratic societies. Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Official Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

"A must-read for scholars across a broad sweep of disciplines. Laurel Weldon weaves together skillfully the theoretical strands of gender equality policy, intersectionality, social movements, and representation in a multimethod/level comparative study that unequivocally places women's movements at the center of our understanding of democracy and social change." ---Amy G. Mazur, Washington State University "Laurel Weldon's When Protest Makes Policy expands and enriches our understanding of representation by stressing social movements as a primary avenue for the representation of marginalized groups. With powerful theory backed by persuasive analysis, it is a must-read for anyone interested in democracy and the representation of marginalized groups." ---Pamela Paxton, University of Texas at Austin "This is a bold and exciting book. There are many fine scholars who look at women's movements, political theorists who make claims about democracy, and policy analysts who do longitudinal treatments or cross-sectional evaluations of various policies. I know of no one, aside from Weldon, who is comfortable with all three of these roles." ---David Meyer, University of California, Irvine What role do social movements play in a democracy? Political theorist S. Laurel Weldon demonstrates that social movements provide a hitherto unrecognized form of democratic representation, and thus offer a significant potential for deepening democracy and overcoming social conflict. Through a series of case studies of movements conducted by women, women of color, and workers in the United States and other member nations of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Weldon examines processes of representation at the local, state, and national levels. She concludes that, for systematically disadvantaged groups, social movements can be as important---sometimes more important---for the effective articulation of a group perspective as political parties, interest groups, or the physical presence of group members in legislatures. When Protest Makes Policy contributes to the emerging scholarship on civil society as well as the traditional scholarship on representation. It will be of interest to anyone concerned with advancing social cohesion and deepening democracy and inclusion as well as those concerned with advancing equality for women, ethnic and racial minorities, the working class, and poor people. S. Laurel Weldon is Professor of Political Science at Purdue University.

This book focuses on the distributional consequences of the public sector and examines and documents, theoretically and empirically, the effects of government spending and taxation on personal distribution, and includes chapters investigating the relationship between the public sector and functional distribution of national income.