Unequal Democracies

While economic inequality has risen in every affluent democracy in North America and Western Europe, the last three decades have also been characterized by falling or stagnating levels of state-led economic redistribution. Why have democratically accountable governments not done more to distribute top-income shares to citizens with low and middle incomes? Unequal Democracies offers answers to this question, bringing together contributions that focus on voters and their demands for redistribution with contributions on elites and unequal representation that is biased against less-affluent citizens. While large and growing bodies of research have developed around each of these perspectives, this volume brings them into rare dialogue. The chapters also incorporate analyses that center exclusively on the United States and those that examine a broader set of advanced democracies to explore the uniqueness of the American case and its contribution to comparative perspectives. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Noam Lupu is Associate Professor of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of Party Brands in Crisis (2016) and the coeditor of Campaigns and Voters in Developing Democracies (2019). He has received numerous awards for his publications and three Emerging Scholar awards from the American Political Science Association.

Jonas Pontusson is a research-active Emeritus Professor at the University of Geneva. Before moving to Geneva in 2010, he taught at Cornell University and Princeton University. He has published extensively in the domains of comparative political economy and comparative welfare states, focusing on labor markets, trade unions, partisan politics, and income inequality and redistribution. From 2017 to 2023, he directed a research program funded by the European Research Council on political inequality and the politics of inequality in advanced industrial states.