Political Inequality Research Articles

Trophy Hunters: War Writing in the Twentieth Century

Trophy Hunters: War Writing in the Twentieth Century

정치적 불평등 완화를 위한 기획, 민주주의 배당

이 연구는 오늘날의 정치적 불평등을 완화하는 기획으로 민주주의 배당(Democracy Dividends)을 제안한다. 이는 투표권을 지닌 모든 시민에게 균등한 정치자금을 배분하고, 시민은 이를 정당이나 후보자에게 자율적으로 기부하는 제도이다. 기본소득이 모든 시민의 경제적 기본권을 보장함으로써 경제적 불평등을 완화하는 기획인 것처럼 민주주의 배당은 모든 시민의 정치적 기본권을 정치자금의 균등한 분배로 확장함으로써 정치적 불평등을 완화하는 기획이다. 이 연구는 정치적 불평등에 관한 논의로 출발하여 아직 한국에 제대로 소개된 바 없는 정치자금 바우처 논의와 세계 최초로 이 바우처 프로그램을 시행하고 있는 미국 시애틀(Seattle)시의 사례를 다룬다. 아울러 한국의 정치자금 제도의 실태와 문제점을 파악하고 현행 정치자금 규모 추정을 기초로 민주주의 배당액의 크기를 예측해 본다.

Commentary: COVID-19 and the Vulnerability of Single Mothers in Institutions of Higher Education.

Commentary: COVID-19 and the Vulnerability of Single Mothers in Institutions of Higher Education.

Interaction (Election Campaigning Communication)

Interaction (Election Campaigning Communication)

Teaching Note—Preparing Students to Engage Voters Through the Lens of Political Justice

ABSTRACT The concept of political justice is deeply tied to our professional Code of Ethics. Social workers are well suited to challenge political inequalities that keep clients and communities from political participation. Laws affecting access to voter registration, casting a ballot, and having that ballot counted vary widely across the United States, making it challenging for social workers to understand how voting laws apply to client populations and therefore how to support their clients’ access. We describe an educational model implemented by one social work program that pairs encouraging voter engagement with building students’ awareness of the systemic barriers that affect whether and by what mechanisms marginalized communities can vote. This model enables students to gain knowledge about concepts of political justice early in their social work education, to see striving toward political justice as part of their ethical obligations as social workers, and to be connected with grassroots organizations that specifically work to expand political access to communities of color and other disenfranchised groups.

The Politics of the Mundane

Extensive research on political participation suggests that parental resources strongly predict participation. Other research indicates that salient political events can push individuals to participate. I offer a novel explanation of how mundane household experiences translate to political engagement, even in settings where low participation levels are typically found, such as immigrant communities. I hypothesize that experiences requiring children of Latinx immigrants to take on “adult” responsibilities provide an environment where children learn the skills needed to overcome the costs associated with participation. I test this hypothesis using three datasets: a survey of Latinx students, a representative survey of young adults, and a 10-year longitudinal study. The analyses demonstrate that Latinx children of immigrants taking on adult responsibilities exhibit higher levels of political activity compared with those who do not. These findings provide new insights into how the cycle of generational political inequality is overcome in unexpected ways and places.

Mayan Traditional Knowledge on Weather Forecasting: Who Contributes to Whom in Coping With Climate Change?

Despite international commitments to integrate indigenous peoples and their Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in actions combating climate change, their inclusion remains limited. Integrating TEK with scientific knowledge has become particularly important in sectors such as agriculture, which both contributes to and is affected by climate change. While there is a general recognition that integrating TEK will contribute to climate change adaptation, agricultural interventions have made little progress in achieving this due to the assumption of a clear divide between TEK and scientific knowledge. This paper considers that knowledge integration is already occurring, but in contexts of economic, sociocultural, and political inequalities. We elaborate on the case of traditional weather forecasting methods used by Mayan indigenous farmers in Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula to propose a social justice perspective for knowledge integration in climate change interventions. Using information from three studies conducted between 2016 and 2019, we first explain the importance of weather and traditional weather forecast methods for indigenous Mayan farmers. Later we describe in detail both these methods and their links with Mayan cosmology. Findings show how weather phenomena such as drought and hurricanes are main concerns for milpa farming. They illustrate the diversity of traditional short, medium, and long-term weather forecast methods based on observations from nature and the sky. Farmers also perform rituals that are related to their Mayan gods and goddess. As TEK not only defines agricultural calendars but also reproduces Mayan culture, we discuss what is needed for its integration into actions combating climate change. We use a rights-based approach that considers the economic, cultural, and political scales of justice to equally allocate resources and benefits for traditional knowledge systems, recognize indigenous values and worldviews avoiding cultural harms, and accomplish indigenous self-determination through equal representation. As a result, we hope to incentivize development actors engaged in agricultural interventions on climate change to critically reflect and examine power dynamics and relations when working with indigenous communities.

The Importance of Political Science for Understanding the Developmental Roots of Gender Gaps in Politics

In “Understanding the Developmental Roots of Gender Gaps in Politics,” Heck et al. argue that “studying children to understand political inequalities among adults … is a critical step to achieving ...

Silence and Violence in the Archive of Slavery

Silence and Violence in the Archive of Slavery

COVID-19 and the political geography of racialisation: Ethnographic cases in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Detroit

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmed health systems around the globe, and intensified the lethality of social and political inequality. In the United States, where public health departments have been severely defunded, Black, Native, Latinx communities and those experiencing poverty in the country’s largest cities are disproportionately infected and disproportionately dying. Based on our collective ethnographic work in three global cities in the U.S. (San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Detroit), we identify how the political geography of racialisation potentiated the COVID-19 crisis, exacerbating the social and economic toll of the pandemic for non-white communities, and undercut the public health response. Our analysis is specific to the current COVID19 crisis in the U.S, however the lessons from these cases are important for understanding and responding to the corrosive political processes that have entrenched inequality in pandemics around the world.

Ethnicity, gender, and intersectionality: How context factors shape the intersectional (dis)advantage under proportional representation rules

This article aims to highlight the contextual impact of proportional representation (PR) rules on the intersectional representation of gender and ethnic groups. We assert that the combination of the institutional and sociodemographic context generates barriers and opportunities for the inclusion of intersectional identity groups in politics. We analyse how the sociodemographic make up of the district electorate influences parties’ and voters’ behaviour within PR systems to shape electoral outcomes in Brussels local elections. We focus on parties’ list composition strategies and candidates’ personal score to determine parties’ and voters’ leverage on representational outcomes. Our research demonstrates that ethnic minority male and female candidates experience a similar advantage on their ethnic majority counterparts in the (s)election process, and that their advantage grows as districts get more diverse. We show that ethnic minority candidates’ advantage comes mainly at the expense of ethnic majority women, while ethnic majority men’s dominant position is not affected by the sociodemographic context. This research emphasizes the importance of local context factors for intersectional groups representation. Our study overall calls for a clear definition of intersectional categories and the social cleavage(s) they represent within societies in order to understand political inequalities and opportunities.

Conceptualizing and Measuring Political Inequality in a Cross-National Perspective

Abstract It is widely believed that economic inequality significantly affects political inequality, and vice versa. However, there has been a lack of empirical evidence about this relationship, particularly, in cross-national comparative research. This is largely because cross-national measures of political inequality are underdeveloped. To fill this gap, this study introduces a new way of conceptualizing and measuring political inequality and constructs the Political Inequality Index (PII), which is mainly based on objective indicators. Additionally, the Political Power Inequality Index (PPII) based on subjective indicators is presented as an alternative measure. This research then explores the features of these measures and investigates the impact of economic inequality on political inequality with the measures. The dynamic panel data analysis controlling for endogeneity provides little evidence that income inequality has a significant effect on political inequality, however.

Conceptualizing and Measuring Political Inequality in a Cross-National Perspective

Conceptualizing and Measuring Political Inequality in a Cross-National Perspective

Pandemic and protest: young people at the forefront of US Pandemonium

ABSTRACT The USA continues with the largest number of Covid-19 confirmed cases and associated deaths worldwide. It is clear that health, recreation, political and education systems will not be the same in a post-Covid context. It is also clear that there are ongoing devastating effects on the rights and well-being of children and young people. Systemic racial, economic and political inequalities that existed before the pandemic are highlighted in stark relief and widened as a result of its differential impact on lower income young people and their families. The protracted US protests over racial inequities and police violence against young African Americans is perhaps the most virulent example of youth push back. The essay looks at the crisis at three different scales: national, state, and local. It suggests a way forward for young people in local places.

Retreating from Redistribution? Trends in Democratic Party Fidelity to Economic Equality, 1984-2020

During his presidency, Barack Obama described rising economic inequality as “the defining challenge of our time.” But a growing number of scholars and journalists argue that rising inequality is in part a result of the Democratic Party’s diminishing fidelity to an egalitarian economic agenda and its embrace of neoliberalism. In this article, we assess the veracity of this claim through content analysis of all national Democratic Party platforms issued since 1984. We find that assertions of Democratic retreat from economic equality are for the most part exaggerated. Broadly, we argue that Democrats’ support for egalitarian policies has been complex and varied over time, showing a marked decline under the influence of the New Democrats in the 1990s, followed by a significant resurgence thereafter. However, while party support for equalizing policies has rebounded, justification for these policies has varied according to the purported deservingness of beneficiaries. Our findings have important implications for debates concerning Democratic Party change, the politics of inequality, and the policy agenda of the incoming Biden administration.

Colonial Education, Political Elites, and Regional Political Inequality in Africa

Political elites tend to favor their home region when distributing resources. But what explains how political power is distributed across a country’s regions to begin with? Explanations of cabinet formation focus on short-term strategic bargaining and some emphasize that ministries are allocated equitably to minimize conflict. Using new data on the cabinet members (1960–2010) of 16 former British and French African colonies, I find that some regions have been systematically much more represented than others. Combining novel historical and geospatial records, I show that this regional political inequality derives not from colonial-era development in general but from colonial-era education in particular. I argue that post-colonial ministers are partly a byproduct of civil service recruitment practices among European administrators that focused on levels of literacy. Regional political inequality is an understudied pathway through which colonial legacies impact distributive politics and unequal development in Africa today. JEL: F54, I26, N37, N47

RESENTMENT – EXCAVATING A RESURGENT PHENOMENON IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY

Resentment is a powerful human emotion that has both private and social dimensions where it manifests in a variety of ways. It has been identified as the force behind uprisings against racial, economic, and political inequality and injustice throughout time, as well as in the contemporary scene. Its moral and socio-political implications have been reflected on ever since Nietzsche identified it as a major contributing factor in the genealogy of morality. Max Scheler made a brilliant phenomenological analysis of it, and Francis Fukuyama recently identified it as a significant force in shaping contemporary identity politics. It has become a significant political force in contemporary South Africa, where the politics of reconciliation have largely been displaced by the politics of resentment. Although it has generally been viewed as having negative consequences for the social compact, its moral justification in specific circumstances has been powerfully made by the holocaust survivor Jean Amery and more recently by Didier Fassin with regard to post-apartheid South Africa. However, it is often accompanied by what Nietzsche called the “falsification of the tablets of value”, which also means that it may lead to alternative mental constructions of reality that might result in delusional perspectives that can have dire social and moral consequences.

Between Market Failures and Justice Failures: Trade-Offs Between Efficiency and Equality in Business Ethics

The Market Failures Approach (MFA) is one of the leading theories in contemporary business ethics. It generates a list of ethical obligations for the managers of private firms that states that they should not create or exploit market failures because doing so reduces the efficiency of the economy. Recently the MFA has been criticised by Abraham Singer on the basis that it unjustifiably does not assign private managers obligations based on egalitarian values. Singer proposes an extension to the MFA, the Justice Failures Approach (JFA), in which managers have duties to alleviate political, social, and distributive inequalities in addition to having obligations to not exploit market failures. In this paper I describe the MFA and JFA and situate them relative to each other. I then highlight a threefold distinction between different types of obligations that can be given to private managers in order to argue that a hybrid theory of business ethics, which I call the MFA + , can be generated by arguing that managers have obligations based on efficiency and duties based on equality to the extent that these latter obligations do not lead to efficiency losses. This argument suggests a novel theoretical option in business ethics, elucidates the issues that are at stake between the MFA and the JFA, and clarifies the costs and benefits of each theory.

City of Water: Port-au-Prince, Inequality, and the Social Meaning of Rain

The history of water infrastructures in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, illuminates the role of the environment in the production of social and political inequality. This article combines original archival research with insights from political ecology and urban anthropology to argue that the circulation of drinking water and flood water was a critical and quotidian form of exchange connecting Haiti’s stratified social hierarchies. A comparative historical analysis of two neighborhoods representative of elite and non-elite communities demonstrates that water infrastructures exacerbated poverty and inequality by facilitating the upward distribution of wealth and the downward distribution of risk. A case study of water politics in the 1970s shows how the Duvalier dictatorship’s technocratic reforms changed urban elites’ expectations of the state and made urban water dynamics a key metric for assessing the presence of the state in daily life. Dominant narratives of urban crisis in Haiti tend to focus exclusively on the challenges posed by unchecked rural-to-urban migration and the demographic expansion of the underclass. This article offers a new angle by uncovering the destructive environmental consequences of elite-driven urban development.

Sticky rice in the blood: Isan people’s involvement in Thailand’s 2020 anti-government protests

ABSTRACT This article examines the extent, form, and motivations for Isan people’s involvement in the 2020 Thai youth protests, both in Thailand’s northeast region and in Bangkok. Based on observations of more than two dozen protests, news analysis, and interviews, this paper argues that Isan people’s participation in these protests was driven by a desire to exert political agency and address the political inequality of khon isan (Isan people), which has been omnipresent throughout the region’s long history of political struggles.