Unequal Democracies

The Research Program

Since September 2017, I am working as a postdoctoral researcher on the research program "Unequal Democracies," directed by Jonas Pontusson and funded by the European Research Council (ERC). The goal of the program is to explore how rising income and wealth inequality affects democratic politics. It does so by bringing together two distinct streams of recent research: the research stream on how inequality affects the policy preferences of different citizens and the research stream on the effects of inequality on the responsiveness of parties and governments to the policy preferences of different citizens. Please visit the program website for more information.

My Research for the Program

While recent research has shown that income bias in government responsiveness is a pervasive feature of contemporary democracies, little is known about the causal mechanisms behind this phenomenon. Income bias might be due to inequality in electoral turnout and other forms of political participation, disproportionate influence of wealthy individuals on policy, and the fact that elected representatives tend to be individuals with relatively high levels of education, occupational status, and income ("descriptive misrepresentation").

Outputs

Coming soon.