Inequality and Electoral Accountability: Can Voters Defend Their Distributive Interests?

Time: 
06.03.2017 - 12:00 to 13:30
Location : 
A 5,6 Raum A 231
Type of Event : 
AB B-Kolloquium
Lecturer: 
Prof. Alan M. Jacobs
Lecturer affiliation: 
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver
Description: 

The rise in economic inequality across much of the OECD in recent decades presents a stark puzzle. Governments in advanced democracies depend for their survival on the support of majorities or large pluralities of the electorate. How, then, can politicians in these systems survive in office while presiding over an increasing concentration of resources among the very few? Why do ordinary mechanisms of electoral accountability not prevent substantial increases in inequality-at-the-top?

I will address this puzzle in two steps. First, drawing on joint work with Tim Hicks and Scott Matthews, I will assess the degree to which lower- and middle-income citizens in fact defend their distributional interests at the ballot box. Drawing on individual-level electoral data and aggregate election results across 15 countries, I will demonstrate that non-rich voters rarely punish governments for concentrating income gains among the rich and often positively reward incumbents for rising inequality. Second, I will present work-in-progress that seeks to understand why voters respond to the economy in ways biased towards the interests of the rich. In particular, I will focus on the role of the news media in shaping the informational environment within which voters form judgments about economic performance. While we know that economic perceptions are influenced by the news, we know little about how the economic news itself responds to changes in the economy with different distributional effects. To what degree is the news driven by the economic welfare of the poor, of the mean or middle, or of the rich? I will report on analyses (with Hicks, Matthews, and Eric Merkley) of a massive new dataset of U.S. economic news content, examining how the tone of economic news responds to real economic developments with differing distributional consequences. We find that the tone of the economic news is positively related to economic developments that favor the very rich – in particular to the wealth share of the top 1 percent – and that this effect is conditioned by the partisan slant of the news source. These tentative results suggest that low- and middle-income citizens (at least in the U.S.) make vote choices in an informational environment systematically tilted against their distributive interests, helping to explain the peculiar coexistence of electoral democracy and economic outcomes that undermine the welfare of majorities.