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Political Inequality in an Age of Democracy: Cross-national Perspectives
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The world has witnessed the creation of new democracies and the maturing of old ones. Yet, everywhere there is democracy, there is also political inequality. Voices of everyday folk struggle to be heard; often, they keep silent. Governments respond mostly to the influential and the already privileged. Our age of democracy, then, is the old age of inequality. This book builds on U.S. scholarship on the topic of political inequality to understand its forms, causes and consequences around the world. Comprised of nine theoretical, methodological and empirical chapters, this path-creating edited collection contains original works by both established and young, up-and-coming social scientists, including those from Latin America, Eastern Europe, Greece and the U.S. Political Inequality in an Age of Democracy addresses the present and future of the concept of political inequality from multi-disciplinary and cross-national perspectives.
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... Applying a system perspective (Mair & Seelos, 2021) to understand why well-intended diversity initiatives fail also calls attention to the sociopolitical system where disparities were created in the first place (Andersen, 1999;DiTomaso, 2021) and thus to political inequality (Dubrow, 2014) that may perpetuate inside organizations. However, the prolific literature on diversity initiatives has largely overlooked this aspect. ...
... Conceiving of inequality in organizations as connected to the economic sphere (Amis et al., 2020;Bapuji et al., 2020), organization and management scholarship has developed a robust set of empirical markers to assess progress with respect to organization-level economic inequality-for example, metrics of employment discrimination, including access to high-salary or highstatus jobs, hierarchy levels, and income inequality (e.g., Alamgir & Cairns, 2015). In contrast, a systematic review of political inequality across disciplines found no articles in the business and organizational literature that appear to engage with this concept (Dubrow, 2014). Thus, we know little about how it is manifested in organizations. ...
Although diversity initiatives are considered prominent vessels for addressing inequality and despite massive investments in them, inequality inside organizations persists. Assessments of diversity initiatives often center on economic inequality and view organizations as closed systems to explain why they fail. Building on a 19-month field-level ethnography of the diversity field in Israel targeting Palestinian employment, we examine political inequality and show how it is perpetuated even as economic inequality is dealt with. Our findings reveal that the field is complicit in creating a chasm between the economic and political spheres by positioning diversity initiatives as a means to tackle economic inequality. The field’s infrastructure and dominant discourse reinforce this chasm and thereby make political inequality invisible, generating false consciousness. Our study challenges the preoccupation of diversity scholarship with universal best practices, suggests avenues for assessing and managing diversity initiatives while taking stock of political inequality, and directs future research to delve into the relationship between the economic and the political in organizations and our societies.
... Without electoral equality, certain groups or individuals may be systematically excluded from the political process, leading to a lack of representation and accountability in government (Dahl 1998). Efforts to promote electoral equality often focus on measures such as ensuring fair and accessible voting procedures, combating voter suppression tactics, promoting voter education and engagement and working to eliminate barriers that prevent certain groups from participating in the political process (Mair 2013;Dubrow 2014). ...
In a democratic environment, political equality implies proportionality. Achieving this in an electoral setting can be complicated and unrealistic. The aim of this article is to investigate the logic, approach and method of creating constituencies in the elections for Slovak self-governing regions in 2022. We track the key attributes related to proportionality: the legislation, the actual creation of constituencies, the mechanisms used for the redistribution of mandates and the achievement of proportionality in individual constituencies within particular regions. Our results indicate considerable disproportionality within the constituencies of particular self-governing regions, which is mainly caused by the lack of effective legislation, the different approaches of authorities in creating constituencies and the absence of limits to the violation of electoral and thus political equality.
... Both forms of participation have crucial effects on all aspects of society. Civic engagement is fundamental to democracy [56] as the primary mechanism by which citizens communicate their needs and mobilise pressure for a government response [20]. Concurrently, social involvement affects many individual outcomes, such as health, employment and education, by contributing to the set of social features -referred to as "social capital" -that enable citizens to work more effectively together and pursue shared objectives [48]. ...
Digital competence (DC) is a broad set of skills, attitudes, and knowledge for confident, critical and responsible use of digital technologies in every aspect of life. DC proves essential in the contemporary digital landscape, yet its diffusion is hindered by biases, misunderstandings, and limited awareness. Teaching Informatics in the educational curriculum is increasingly supported by the institutions but faces serious challenges, such as teacher upskilling and support. In response, grassroots movements promoting computing literacy in an informal setting have grown, including EU Code Week, whose vision is to develop computing skills while promoting diversity and raising awareness of the importance of digital skills. This study extensively analyses EU Code Week editions spanning 2014 to 2021 across European Union member states, pursuing three primary objectives: firstly, to evaluate the teacher engagement in the campaign in terms of penetration, retention, and spatial distribution; secondly, to characterise the multifaceted audience and themes embraced by these initiatives; and lastly, to investigate the influence of socio-economic factors on engagement. The investigation uncovers the underlying mechanisms fostering Code Week’s engagement, providing insights to campaign organisers for strategic planning and resource allocation in future editions. Moreover, the analysis reveals that the most engaged areas are characterised by lower income, as well as lower digital literacy, restricted access to technology, and a less established computer education, suggesting that Code Week thrives precisely where its impact is most needed.
... Civic engagement in general, and political participation in particular, are fundamental to democracy [53]. It is the mechanism by which citizens are able to communicate their needs and mobilise pressure for a government response [23]. One of its cornerstones is that participation must be voluntary so that citizens can express their humanitarian and civic concerns and pursue their self-interest. ...
Digital competence (DC) is a broad set of skills, attitudes, and knowledge for confident, critical and responsible use of digital technologies in every aspect of life. DC is fundamental to all people in conducting a productive and fulfilling life in an increasingly digital world. However, prejudices, misconceptions, and lack of awareness reduce the diffusion of DC, hindering digital transformation and preventing countries and people from realising their full potential. Teaching Informatics in the curriculum is increasingly supported by the institutions but faces serious challenges, such as teacher upskilling and support, and will require several years to observe sizeable outcomes. In response, grassroots movements promoting computing literacy in an informal setting have grown, including EU Code Week, whose vision is to develop computing skills while promoting diversity and raising awareness of the importance of digital skills. Code Week participation is a form of public engagement that could be affected by socio-economic and demographic factors, as any other form of participation. The aim of the manuscript is twofold: first, to offer a detailed and comprehensive statistical description of Code Week's participation in the EU Member States in terms of penetration, retention, demographic composition, and spatial distribution in order to inform more effective awareness-raising campaigns; second, to investigate the impact of socio-economic factors on Code Week involvement. The study identifies a strong negative correlation between participation and income at different geographical scales. It also suggests underlying mechanisms driving participation that are coherent with the "psychosocial" and the "resource" views, i.e. the two most widely accepted explanations of the effect of income on public engagement.
... In developing countries where more people work in the informal sector and live in peri-urban areas, they often do not have the status of rights like those of formal workers (UN-Habitat 2016). That means they do often not have access to participation in political decision processes, though political equality represents that "everybody's preferences are equally weighted in political decisions" (Dubrow 2015). ...
... First, POLPAN is anchored in theories of social structure. Social structure has a pervasive impact on the socio-economic and cultural resources (Bourdieu, 1986;Becker, 1994;Weeden et al., 2007), values and beliefs (Kohn, 1959;Rokeach, 1979a;Kohn et al., 1990;Inglehart and Baker, 2000;Hitlin and Piliavin, 2004), attitudes (Glass, Bengtson and Dunham, 1986;Rose, Mishler and Haerpfer, 1998;Kraus, Piff and Keltner, 2009), behaviours (Kohn, Scotch and Glick, 1979;Goldthorpe, 1999;Chan, 2010;Piff et al., 2010;Dubrow, 2014), and health (Mirowski and Ross, 2003;Stephens, Markus and Fryberg, 2012) of individuals and social groups. Changes in the social structure are 'path dependent'. ...
The Polish Panel Survey POLPAN provides data infrastructure to analyze the dynamics of social inequality from a life-course perspective. Historical events shape the study’s research design. In 1987–1988, 5,817 randomly sampled men and women aged 21–65 are interviewed in what is still state socialist Poland. Soon after, their lives are upended by the profound transformations that the anti-communist revolutions in Eastern Europe triggered. To understand how people transition to the emerging social structure, close to half of the respondents are re-interviewed in 1993. This sample serves as a panel that we follow every 5 years, most recently in 2018. Since 1998, POLPAN waves feature renewal samples of the youngest cohort that become part of the panel. Participants are interviewed face-to-face on a wide range of topics, including educational and occupational careers, psychological functioning, physical and mental health, political behaviours, and social attitudes. These topics address POLPAN’s overarching research problem, how does social position influence individual biographies and social networks, and how do individual choices that peoples’ biographies and networks reflect, in turn influence their later social standing. A multi-dimensional approach to data quality informs POLPAN methodology and the decision to publicly share the project’s products, including datasets and analytic tools.
... According to three of the people interviewed, the bureaucracy and administrative complexity are so high and centralized in Brazil that more resources and time are required by institutions as "control for all institutions increases as corruption increases" (INEA expert, 2015b). In Brazil, political inequality, as the capacity to deal with natural hazard-related risk reduction at the municipal level, is highly related to decentralization (Dubrow, 2015). This necessity for decentralization in processes for DRR is a relatable issue for many Latin American countries (Ruiz-Rivera and Melgarejo-Rodríguez, 2017). ...
Between 1980 and 2015, around 1.6 billion people were killed in meteorological, geophysical, hydrological or climatological disasters. Future annual losses are estimated to reach US$314 billion in the built environment alone. The number of relevant natural loss events worldwide has more than doubled in the last 30 years, causing loss of lives, damage to infrastructure, and a negative impact on the economy. Governmental and non-governmental institutions have started to invest in disaster risk reduction, some of them in line with international frameworks like the Hyogo framework for action (2005–2015), or the Sendai framework (2015–2030). Given the great climatic changes challenging society, together with socio-political changes, disaster risk reduction seems an evident priority for governance, yet this seems to be a subject that is not often mentioned on governmental agendas. While the literature has tended to focus on the substance of disaster risk reduction, little research is available on learning about the design, application, and operationalization of disaster risk governance. Most of the case studies in the literature are in countries of the global north, where systems are well established, information is abundant, and communication networks are strong. Regions with dynamic environments, where socio-political and economic systems are constantly changing and information is not accessible, may require a new approach and specific cases to support changes, adjustments, and additions to existing concepts of disaster risk governance.
But how are existing concepts of disaster risk governance translated into potential and applied ways of dealing with dynamic environments in the context of disaster risk reduction? With the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) definition of disaster risk and the International Risk Governance Council (IRGC) framework for risk governance, this study evaluates disaster risk governance with an interdisciplinary approach in a specific case. The core of the case study is Rio de Janeiro State, one of the most dynamic states in Brazil in terms of population and economic growth affected by floods, droughts, and landslides. Through 391 quantitative questionnaires, 26 semi-structured qualitative interviews, 11 focus groups and 3 workshops, plus secondary data and participant observation, it reveals the institutional arrangement of the state, the perception of the population living in the risk areas of Nova Friburgo – one of the most affected municipalities in 2011 – the participatory mechanisms implemented by institutions involved, and the relationship of communication and power between public power and civil society.
The main factors for disaster risk governance according to peer-reviewed literature are explored and prioritized through a quantitative literature review method. These factors added to secondary data and an integrated participatory methodology are the base for the field research in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Local population perceptions in the risk areas of Nova Friburgo municipality and their main influences are revealed using descriptive statistics, factor analysis, and regression on the survey results. Participation is determined in institutional processes through interviews and by applying Fung’s triangle of participation. The solid outcomes of participatory mapping at different levels are measured and compared to explore applied and potential ways of dealing with disaster risk reduction. Governance, communication, and power connections are finally analyzed through three workshops and all the previously described processes.
In disaster risk governance, public power and civil society have different interests and a complete win-win situation is very unlikely. Decision-making in risk governance processes has to deal with trade-offs that need to be understood and considered by all stakeholders. Factors like lack of trust, miscommunication, and negative perception are especially difficult to address and may not be eliminated completely but can be considerably diminished. State institutions working for disaster risk in a mostly top-down, centralized system that does not enforce participation creates polarization, mistrust, and only few communication and meeting points between the civil society and public power. Abrupt changes to the top-down system do not affect the organized civil society at the same velocity. While consequences of changes are immediate in respect of public power (budget cuts, structural changes, and positions shifting), civil society will only shift in the long term at a slower pace. Even with future changes in the government strongly influencing these processes in other directions, networks should grow stronger and remain dynamic.
The feeling of neglect in these trade-offs in the population living in risk areas requires an understanding of the complexity and the actors involved in order that they feel acknowledged. Clear communication of how the decisions are made, added to an opportunity to take part in those decisions should be a key component and a starting point for better risk governance, followed by continuity of those processes to improve perception and trust. Enabling societies to benefit from constant change while avoiding the negative consequences of the associated risks, as the IGRC affirms, requires cohesion of the different stakeholders. Implementing examples, such as the one presented in the case study, on a bigger scale will require significant effort, time, and resource investment. This specific case can also be used to improve appraisal, communication, and management in surrounding areas and similar cases in peri-urban areas with rapid growth and high dynamism. With greater and stronger changes forecast, continuity (a key factor of all governance processes) is, and will remain, a real challenge in Brazil, requiring physical and temporary space on the agendas of all stakeholders.
... The rest of the candidates participated in Pilkada through the party nomination route. 2. For a more comprehensive treatment, see Dubrow (2014Dubrow ( , 2015. 3. Of the five non-partisan independents, one winner was a special case -he won an election versus a fellow independent, because the incumbent was disqualifid for violating election rules. ...
This article examines the phenomenon of independent candidates ( calon perseorangan) in Indonesia’s regional executive elections (Pilkada) to better understand why candidates run as independents and whether independent candidacy has reduced political inequality in the electoral system. In this study, we compiled candidate information using Indonesia’s General Election Commission’s (Komisi Pemilihan Umum, KPU) database as well as structured open-source searches to develop a data set and profiles of independents over three election cycles. Using this data set, we distinguished three categories of independents – partisan, non-partisan, and underdog independents – by analysing differences in power resources and motivations among the candidates. We found that contrary to public perceptions in Indonesia, independent candidacy has not helped to alleviate unequal access to political office. Successful independents are predominantly political insiders and local notables. This finding has important implications for democracy in Indonesia – we show how the inability for political outsiders to win political office harms democratic representation.
At a time when immigration and ethnic relations issues are hotly disputed across Europe, and challenged by minorities and xenophobes, the explicit aim of this collection is to present substantive cross-national contributions on this new quality of contentious politics. That European countries have dealt with the integration of minorities in different ways, often bound up in conceptions of nationhood and citizenship traditions, indicates that research will benefit from more systematic cross-national comparisons. Secondly, the new contentiousness of immigration and ethnic relations politics points to a need for more systematic linkages between policy analyses and the public conflicts that are mobilized by xenophobic, minority, and anti-racist movements. Thirdly, although the topics of the extreme right and ethnic minorities have been largely dealt with as distinct fields, a greater cross-thematic conceptualisation is necessary The book divides into four parts. In the first, authors offer conceptual approaches to migration and ethnic relations politics drawing strongly on cross-national observations. Parts two and three are empirical analyses based on a method of systematic cross-national comparison. Whereas the institutionalised aspects of immigration and ethnic relations politics are the topic of part two, the third focuses more on the public contentious dimensions. Finally, in light of the important claims that nation-states are no longer the significant framework of reference for politics in a globalizing world, the contributions to part four address the emergence of the transnational level of political authority and its implications for national and sub-national politics, and challenges by social movements.
No issue in Mexican politics received more attention in selecting the 1982 presidential candidate than the role of the technocrat. The technocrat's influence on the Mexican state has had widespread consequences, such as changing political recruitment patterns, altering the socialization of political leaders, shifting career channels essential to advancement within the political system, and most significantly, causing adjustments in the stability of the political system. Crucial to any discussion of the changing role played by the technocrat in Mexican politics is a clear understanding of the term technocrat. This essay therefore will discuss conceptualizations of the technocrat, attempt a working definition of the term in the Mexican context, provide empirical evidence as to the presence of technocrats in Mexican politics, and suggest possible consequences for the political system.
This book was initially designed for teaching purposes, to enable students of wsociology to become better equipped to cope with the pitfalls of sociological research. But it is not just a primer setting out the difficulties and risks of scientific work in sociology with the aid of illustrative texts drawn from the whole range of the human sciences; it is also a contribution in its own right to the epistemology of the social sciences. In accordance with the initial didactic intention, it was originally planned as the first part of a three-volume textbook, which was to deal not only with the epistemological foundations of the science of sociology but also with the major questions this science puts to itself and with the methodological resources of empirical sociological research. This original intention was not fulfilled, as is explained in the Preface to the second French edition and also in the interview with Pierre Bourdieu in this new edition.
O artigo procura mostrar que a idéia liberal de assegurar uma igual liberdade para todos deve ser reexaminada em dois âmbitos de discussões acerca de um desejável equilíbrio entre liberdade e igualdade, de forma a evitar a separação tanto da liberdade e da igualdade como dos domínios opondo reivindicações formais e substantivas. Estas devem antes ser consideradas em suas condições correlatas, exigidas para um exercício democrático efetivo da autonomia privada e pública dos cidadãos, como foi sugerido por Habermas.O artigo mostra que a questão da igualdade de condição não pode evitar as difíceis questões suscitadas pelo chamado debate sobre a “diferença” e tentativas de ir “além da igualdade e da diferença “ ou de “reconstruir” um ideal de igual cidadania numa democracia. Deve lidar com aspectos levantados em discussões sobre a igualdade de condição e o respeito. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Democracia. Habermas. Igualdade. Liberdade. Respeito.