Left Governmental Power and the Reduction of Inequalities in Western Europe (1871–2020)

Abstract

Despite considerable attention in the literature, existing studies analyzing the effect of left governmental power on inequalities suffer from three main limitations: a privileged focus on economic forms of inequality at the expense of political and social ones, inaccurate measurements of left governmental power, and a narrow timespan of the analyses. This article addresses such concerns through a comparative longitudinal analysis where the impact of left governmental power on different measures of political, social, and economic inequalities is investigated in 20 Western European countries across the last 150 years. Data show that, consistent with previous literature, the left in government has significantly reduced most forms of inequalities. However, the equalizing effect of the left in government has decreased over time and has become not significant since the 1980s. The left is today incapable of accomplishing its historical mission of reducing inequalities. The article discusses rationale and implications of these findings.

Full text

Article
Left Governmental Power and the
Reduction of Inequalities in Western
Europe (1871–2020)
Vincenzo Emanuele and Federico Trastulli
Despite considerable attention in the literature, existing studies analyzing the effect of left governmental power on inequalities suffer
from three main limitations: a privileged focus on economic forms of inequality at the expense of political and social ones, inaccurate
measurements of left governmental power, and the analyses’narrow time spans. This article addresses such concerns through a
comparative longitudinal analysis where the impact of left governmental power on different measures of political, social, and
economic inequalities is investigated in 20 Western European countries across the last 150 years. Data show that, consistent with
previous literature, the Left in government has significantly reduced most forms of inequalities. However, the equalizing effect of
the Left in government has decreased over time and has become not significant since the 1980s. The Left is today incapable of
accomplishing its historical mission of reducing inequalities. The article discusses the rationale and implications of these findings.
Keywords: Left parties, governmental power, equality, Western Europe, 1871–2020
1. Introduction
In recent years, political scientists have found a renewed
interest in social democracy and class politics. Besides
the endless debate on the decline, persistence, or trans-
formation of class voting (Elff2007; Franklin, Mackie,
and Valen 1992; Oesch 2006), the literature has recently
moved in different directions. First, it has focused on the
recent electoral crisis of the Left (Benedetto, Hix, and
Mastrorocco 2020; Delwit 2021; Emanuele and Trastulli
2023; Loxbo et al. 2019). Second, it has tested the
resilience of the link between left electoral mobilization
and its historical cleavage roots (Emanuele 2023;2024).
Third, it has empirically investigated the long-term debate
on the alleged programmatic shift to the right of the
mainstream Left (Abou-Chadi and Wagner 2020; Bremer
2018; Polacko 2022). Finally, it has looked into the
composition of the left electorate to test whether its core
social constituency has shifted from the working class to
*Data replication sets are available in Harvard Dataverse at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OCXAW5
Corresponding author: Vincenzo Emanuele (vemanuele@luiss.it, Italy) is Associate Professor in Political Science at the
Department of Political Science, LUISS Guido Carli, Rome. His research has appeared in Comparative Political Studies,
Perspectives on Politics, the European Journal of Political Research,West European Politics,Party Politics,South
European Society and Politics,Government and Opposition, and Comparative European Politics, among other journals.
His books include Cleavages, Institutions, and Competition: Understanding Vote Nationalisation in Western Europe
(1965–2015) (2018) and The Deinstitutionalization of Western European Party Systems (2022).
Federico Trastulli (federico.trastulli@univr.it, Italy) is Postdoctoral Researcher in Political Science at the Department of
Human Sciences, University of Verona, and Research Affiliate at the Italian Center for Electoral Studies (CISE). His research
interests concern political parties, voting behavior, and the dimensions of political conflict in Italy and Western Europe from a
multimethod perspective. His research has featured in Representation,Italian Political Science Review,Modern Italy,
European Politics and Society, and the Italian Journal of Electoral Studies, among others. His recently defended PhD thesis is
titled “The Determinants of Intrafamily Ideological Differentiation: Western European Social Democracy between 1990 and
2019.”
doi:10.1017/S1537592724000628 1
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association. This is an Open
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permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724000628 Published online by Cambridge University Press

urban sociocultural professionals (Abou-Chadi and Wag-
ner 2019; Karreth, Polk, and Allen 2013; Rennwald and
Evans 2014).
Within this growing body of work, a comparatively
underexplored aspect is the effect produced by left parties
in government and its evolution over time. In particular, in
view of the recent electoral crisis of left parties and their
abovementioned social, organizational, and political trans-
formations, it is worth asking whether left parties are still
able to follow their “polar star,”namely to realize the
historical goals that constitute the very foundation of the
Left. These can, first and foremost, be summarized
through a single, overarching objective: the pursuit of
equality (Bobbio 1997; Lukes 2003).
Of course, the relationship between left power—which
we understand as the strength of left parties in government
—and the reduction of inequalities—meaning the uneven
distribution of power and resources among individuals in a
given society—has received great attention in the social
sciences. However, these works suffer from three main
shortcomings. First, as this literature mainly comes from
fields outside comparative politics (e.g., international
political economy and economic sociology), it has almost
exclusively focused on economic forms of inequality, thus
neglecting the multidimensional nature of this concept.
Second, it has often employed inaccurate proxies of the
focal predictor—the power of the Left—which are at risk
of being misleading in effectively conveying the underly-
ing concept. Third, it has mostly covered a narrow time
span, generally a few decades toward the end of the
twentieth century. Consequently, it lacks a comparative
historical perspective, which is crucial to both gauge the
long-term evolution of the impact of left power on the
pursuit of equality and capture the potential consequences
of recent political, social, and economic transformations in
this relationship.
This article aims to fill these gaps in this strand of
literature and contribute to this renewed interest in
left politics by asking a very simple, albeit fundamental,
research question: does the Left in government
reduce inequalities? This question is addressed through
comparative longitudinal analysis and a time-series
cross-section dataset, taking into account 20 Western
European countries and more than six hundred legisla-
tive terms from 1871 to 2020. Besides its extended
spatial and temporal scope, additional added values of
this article are the operationalization of our focal predic-
tor—left governmental power—through a measure that
is more fine-grained compared to the existing alternatives
and the disentanglement of our explanandum through
political, social, and economic indicators of inequality.
We find that, in line with theoretical expectations and
the bulk of existing evidence, the Left in government has
historically reduced inequality, although we show that this
is truer in some areas (i.e., access to political power
according to socioeconomic position and social group,
educational and health disparities, and welfare state uni-
versalism) than in others (access to political power accord-
ing to gender and income inequality). Yet, the most
striking finding of our analysis is that the equalizing effect
of the Left in government has decreased over time and has
become not significant since the 1980s. Moreover, the
analysis also shows that in the last 40 years, the Left in
government has become indistinguishable from the
Center-Right in its (in)ability to reduce inequalities.
Therefore, in recent decades, it seems that the Left has
lost its raison d’être, as it has no longer been able to uphold
its defining principle of reducing inequalities through
government action.
The article is structured as follows: the next
section critically reviews the literature on the relationship
between left power and equality and introduces our hypoth-
eses; the third section introduces our focal predictor, left
governmental power, while the fourth section focuses on the
operationalization of the dependent variables, namely the
measures of political, social, and economic inequalities;
the fifth section presents the control variables and the
method to be employed in the analyses; the sixth
section shows the empirical results and, finally, the conclud-
ing section discusses the article’sfindings and implications.
2. Theoretical Background and
Hypotheses
The mission of the political Left is described by Norberto
Bobbio (1997, 96) as “the destruction of a despotic regime
founded on inequality between those at the top and those
at the bottom of the social scale, perceived as unjust
precisely because it is inegalitarian and constituted
hierarchically.”Generally speaking, the view that the Left
pursues social change in an egalitarian direction to rectify
socially determined disparities is widely shared in the
literature (Anderson 1998; Bartolini 2000; Lukes 2003;
Noël and Thérien 2008). This is because of the Left’s
conception of human nature, whereby what makes people
similar is greater than what sets them apart (Bobbio 1997;
White 2011). Hence, in political contexts determined by
electoral competition, the Left seeks power to be in a
position to actively pursue this goal. It is, then, legitimate
to ask and investigate whether this goal is actually
achieved. Of course, the capacity of left parties in govern-
ment to pursue this objective is conditional on several
contextual factors, from international security and stability
to the current state of the economy, to external and
internal economic and institutional constraints (Bircan,
Brück, and Vothknecht 2017; Fernández-i-Marín et al.
2023; Jahn 2018; Mair 2009). In particular, seminal
works underline that weak labor-market institutions, the
lack of institutionalized collective bargaining, and the
maturation of previous welfare commitments negatively
2Perspectives on Politics
Article |Left Governmental Power and the Reduction of Inequalities
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724000628 Published online by Cambridge University Press

impact the capacity of partisan actors to pursue egalitarian
policies (Garrett 1998; Pierson 2001).
The link between the Left and the reduction of
inequalities has been analyzed by several works, especially
within the strand of “power resource theory”(for an
overview, see Brady, Blome, and Kleider 2016). How-
ever, this literature has evident shortcomings.
1
For a start,
substantively, only a few of these works specifically look
at the impact of left power on the reduction of inequal-
ities as their core focus (Garritzmann and Seng 2016;
Kauder and Potrafke 2013)oraspartofit(Busemeyer
2009;Hewitt1977;Jensen2010). Further, such contri-
butions most often rely on rather idiosyncratic research
designs, especially in terms of the measurement of left
power, the selection of countries, and the (usually short)
time span covered, making an overall historical assess-
ment of the Left’s impact on inequality difficult. Finally,
albeit from a theoretical viewpoint, equality is a multi-
dimensional concept that also includes political and social
aspects (see, e.g., McKnight, Mendes Loureiro, and
Vizard 2019), yet this literature has almost exclusively
focused on economic forms of inequality. This translates
into widespread neglect of the Left’simpactonsocialand
especially political forms of inequality.
Indeed, political inequality is only considered marginally
within the theoretical strand of power resource theory.
Studies explicitly investigating the link between left power
and political aspects of inequality are limited to assessments
of the positive effect that the parliamentary strength of left
parties has on women’s access to elected office (Kenworthy
and Malami 1999), hence substantively overlapping with
the existing contributions on gender inequality at large
(e.g., Avdeyeva 2009; Esping-Andersen 1993). However,
the relevant literature does not provide insights into the
association between left power and equality of access to
political power according to socioeconomic status and
social group, including ethnicity, race, and religion. This
is a theoretical gap that this article aims to fill.
Existing research is also limited in its assessment of how
the Left impacts social forms of inequality. With regard to
education, the Left is generally found to expand educa-
tional access once in power (Ansell 2008; Braga, Checchi,
and Meschi 2013; Busemeyer 2009;Hewitt1977; Kauder
and Potrafke 2013). Whether an expansion of education
spending occurs when the Left is in power is instead
debated: while some argue that this is the case
(Busemeyer 2009; Schmidt 2007), others contend that
the impact of left power on education spending is unclear
(Ansell 2008; Jensen 2011) or absent (Garritzmann and
Seng 2016). Beyond this form of inequality, little research
exists on the effect of left power on healthcare, with
available works (e.g., Huber and Stephens 2000) indicating
that the stronger the Left, the lower the health inequalities.
Finally, as already mentioned, most of the available
contributions focus primarily on economic inequalities.
Within this area, existing works distinguish between
inequality of access to welfare provisions and income
inequality. The Left appears to have had a positive effect
on welfare and social expenditure expansion in OECD
countries (Allan and Scruggs 2004; Huber and Stephens
2000; Iversen and Soskice 2015; Jensen 2010), while on
income inequality evidence from the literature is more
mixed. Several studies (e.g., Beramendi and Cusack 2009;
Bradley et al. 2003; Huber and Stephens 2014; Iversen
and Soskice 2006; Pontusson, Rueda, and Way 2002;
Rueda and Pontusson 2000) highlight a direct and positive
effect of left power on the reduction of income inequality.
Yet, many contributions (e.g., Hicks and Kenworthy
2003; Lupu and Pontusson 2011; Mahler 2010; Morlino
2020; Rueda 2008;Yi2013) challenge this side of the
debate, arguing that there is no significant effect of left
power on income inequality. A prime example is provided
by Kristal (2010), who demonstrates that left cabinets have
a negative short-term effect on labor’s national income
share while having no long-term effect at all.
Overall, despite some mixed findings within the litera-
ture, our general theoretical expectation is that the power of
the Left, based on its whole political history and consistent
with its mission (Bobbio 1997), is positively associated with
the reduction of political, social, and economic inequalities.
Hence, we can derive the following hypothesis:
H1: The higher the governmental power of the Left, the lower
the political, social, and economic inequalities.
Besides this general hypothesis, we are also interested in
understanding whether the relationship between left
power and inequalities has changed over time. This is
because, during the last 150 years, since the class cleavage
was first politicized through the mobilization of the work-
ing class (Lipset and Rokkan 1967), left parties and the
surrounding political, social, and economic context of
Western European societies have experienced remarkable
changes. Once in government, the Left sought to build
more egalitarian societies, mainly by constructing inclu-
sive welfare state structures. However, especially in recent
decades, a number of phenomena that could potentially
transform this relationship have emerged.
First, left parties, and particularly social democratic
formations, have recently experienced a dramatic electoral
decline (Benedetto, Hix, and Mastrorocco 2020; Delwit
2021; Loxbo et al. 2019). For instance, just to mention one
of the most astonishing cases, the vote share of the French
Socialist Party (PS) collapsed from 29.4% to 7.4% in the
2017 legislative elections. Similar record-low results have
recently occurred in Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and
Switzerland. This electoral crisis has resulted in reduced
access to government for the Left and, therefore, may have
restricted its opportunities to produce egalitarian policies.
Second, the massive social and economic development
experienced by Western European societies during the
3
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twentieth century may have led to a sense of accomplish-
ment vis-à-vis the historical mission of the Left. Indeed, the
long march toward equality in its various forms may have
today reached such high standards that there may be little
room for further improvements. For instance, as recently
shown by Alvaredo and colleagues (2018,9–11), since the
second half of the 1990s, Europe has become the world’s
least unequal region in economic terms.
The third potential phenomenon contributing to
undermining the relationship between left power and
the reduction of inequalities regards the increasing external
constraints deriving from membership in supranational
institutions and embeddedness in globalized markets.
These factors put governing parties under tremendous
pressure from the “responsibility vs. responsiveness
dilemma”(Mair 2009). The increasingly limited discre-
tion available to national governments on social and
economic policy has led left parties in government to
privilege responsibility toward external constraints at the
expense of responsiveness toward their traditional constit-
uency and, therefore, to assume more centrist economic
positions. This positional shift has meant that the Left has
moved away from its traditional goals in a convergence
with the mainstream Right (Evans and Tilley 2017;
Karreth, Polk, and Allen 2013; Mair 2008; Polacko 2022).
Additionally, we must also consider the possibility that
not only the ability of left parties to reduce inequalities but
also their willingness to do so has gradually waned over
time. Indeed, the structural and behavioral dealignment
constituted by the shrinking and transformations of the
working class and the emergence of postmaterialist issues
and values cutting across traditional class loyalties (Best
2011;Goldberg2020) have meant that, in order to remain
electorally competitive, left parties have had to progressively
shift their reference constituency away from industrial
workers to sociocultural professionals, and their program-
matic focus away from traditional left goals (e.g., Abou-
Chadi and Wagner 2019; Oesch and Rennwald 2018).
2
This transformation may have also been reinforced by the
decline in size and political relevance of unions (e.g.,
Rennwald and Pontusson 2021), which traditionally com-
pel left parties to pursue a leftist policy agenda (Garrett
1998; Piazza 2001). Based on such considerations, we
expect that the impact of left power on inequalities decreases
over time. As a result, our second hypothesis is as follows:
H2: The impact of left governmental power on inequalities
decreases over time.
3. Left Governmental Power
Moving toward the empirical part of the study, the first
task is to outline and measure our focal predictor, namely
left governmental power. To do so, a preliminary step is
defining what the political Left is and which political
formations can be considered left parties. As mentioned
in the introduction, we focus on 20 Western European
countries through a comparative longitudinal perspec-
tive.
3
Indeed, we go back in time to include all cases in
which left parties contested elections in Western Europe
since the class cleavage was first politicized. While many
studies on the topic suffer from short-termism, this choice
avoids the error of “judg[ing] contemporary politics by the
exceptional standards of mid-20th century Western
European politics”(Enyedi and Deegan-Krause 2007,
13). Moreover, the extended temporal scope of this article
allows for assessing the long-term evolution of the impact
of left power on the reduction of inequalities and its
changes over time. The first observation considered is
Germany in 1871, and the last one is Ireland in 2020.
4
Consistent with this long-term perspective, we consider
left parties to be the historical communist, socialist, social
democratic, and labor parties that originally emerged to
mobilize the working class (Bartolini 2000; Bartolini and
Mair 1990). Moreover, we also carefully assess the inclu-
sion of these parties’direct successors or of new parties
emphasizing traditional left issues. This choice has been
made to ensure the consistency of the case selection
throughout the longitudinal time span of the analysis.
This is why we do not consider parties of the so-called
“new politics”emphasizing issues like environmentalism,
feminism, and civil rights (Müller-Rommel 1989;
Poguntke 1987), which have emerged since the 1970s.
5
For this classification, we rely on previous studies by
Bartolini and Mair (1990) and Emanuele (2023;2024).
The list of 114 left parties resulting from this effort is
reported in table A1 in the appendix.
6
After clarifying which parties can be considered as part
of the left bloc, the subsequent and far-from-
straightforward step is to measure the governmental power
of the Left. The literature on power resource theory does
not always focus directly on governmental power. Indeed,
scholars looking at the power of left parties rather than
other left organizations (e.g., trade unions, social move-
ments) use various measures with varying degrees of
accuracy and sophistication. For instance, some focus on
the share of parliamentary seats (Braga, Checchi, and
Meschi 2013; Hewitt 1977), which is certainly far from
a satisfactory measure, as it tells us nothing about whether
left parties are in government and, therefore, can shape
policy outcomes. Most scholars, however, do look directly
into the governmental arena. Some do so by using
Cusack’s(1997) index of cabinet ideological balance,
which provides a synthetic score of a cabinet’s overall
ideological position (Pontusson, Rueda, and Way 2002;
Rueda and Pontusson 2000; for other versions of Cusack’s
index, see also Beramendi and Cusack 2009; Iversen and
Soskice 2015; Lupu and Pontusson 2011), while others
consider whether the Left is in government or not and then
weight their power by their share of parliamentary seats
vis-à-vis other cabinet partners (Bradley et al. 2003; Huber
4Perspectives on Politics
Article |Left Governmental Power and the Reduction of Inequalities
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724000628 Published online by Cambridge University Press

and Stephens 2000; Kristal 2010). Finally, the most
sophisticated measure employed by the literature so far is
the share of cabinet seats held by left parties (Allan and
Scruggs 2004; Garritzmann and Seng 2016; Jensen 2010).
While this is certainly more accurate compared to the
previously mentioned alternatives, even this measure does
not properly convey either the cabinet’s status in parlia-
ment or a party’s status in the cabinet. Indeed, on the one
hand, even holding all cabinet seats cannot tell us whether
a party governs as a single-party majority or as a minority
government. On the other hand, if the left party holds less
than 50% of cabinet seats, it is not possible to discern
whether the party has a junior or leading status in cabinet
because, for instance, a left party with 40% of the seats
may be either a leading partner of a multiparty cabinet or a
junior partner alongside another party holding the remain-
ing 60% of cabinet seats. Both instances show that even
the most advanced among the existing measures miss
important information about the effective power the Left
can exert over policy outcomes. Overall, we believe that, to
different extents, all such operationalizations are unsatis-
factory. Hence, to measure the power of the Left, we turn
to Bartolini’s(1998) governmental power index. This
instrument measures the power of a party (or a bloc of
parties) at a given time point (e.g., a given year or
legislative term) by considering different characteristics.
First, it considers the government status of the party. Here,
it distinguishes not only between cabinet and opposition
status, but also considers situations in which the party
provides an abstention or external support that is necessary
for the survival of the minority cabinet. Second, it takes
into account the cabinet’s status in parliament. Here, the
index considers whether the cabinet has a majority status
and whether the party governs alone or in a coalition.
Third, it assesses the status of the parties in cabinet. Here,
Bartolini’s index looks at the parliamentary seats of cabinet
partners to discriminate whether a party leads the cabinet,
has an equal standing with others, or is a junior coalition
partner. Furthermore, Bartolini considers the additional
aspect of cabinet duration. This is relevant only when
legislative terms or longer time periods are used as units of
analysis in order to weigh the governmental power of each
cabinet by its duration within the legislative term. Build-
ing on these elements, Bartolini proposes an index ranging
from 0 to 13, thus providing a rank-ordering of govern-
mental power across all possible combinations of cabinet
characteristics and the role of parties within them.
To the best of our knowledge, besides Bartolini’s(2000)
initial descriptive account of the governmental power of
the class bloc, this index has never been applied empirically
in subsequent works, probably because of the very time-
consuming effort required for the data collection process.
Despite this hurdle, we believe that this endeavor is
worthwhile to give a more accurate account of left power
in Western Europe.
We provide a refinement of Bartolini’s original measure.
Our index ranges from 0 (when the Left is in opposition) to
10 (when the Left holds a single-party majority cabinet) as
we eliminate the original measure’s scenario in which the
left party has an equal standing vis-à-vis other governing
partners. Indeed, we look at parties’share of cabinet seats—
which we believe is a more precise assessment of a party’s
status in cabinet than parliamentary seats—and, in cases
where two parties hold the same share of seats, rather than
attributing an equal status to both, we consider the follow-
ing criteria to break the tie and distinguish between leading
and junior partners: if the prime minister belongs to one of
these parties, we deem that party to be the leading partner;
otherwise, if the prime minister does not belong to either
party, we deem the leading partner to be the one with the
larger share of parliamentary seats.
7
Our governmental
power index (GPI) is calculated at the level of legislative
terms and can be applied to both single parties or blocs of
parties: in this case, the left bloc.
8
Table 1 reports the GPI value for the different combi-
nations of the three aforementioned aspects (government
Table 1
Governmental Power Index: Dimensions and Values
Government status of the party Cabinet status in parliament Party status in cabinet GPI
In cabinet Single–party majority Leading 10
Minimum winning coalition Leading 9
Junior 6
Surplus coalition Leading 8
Junior 4
Single–party minority Leading 7
Multi–party minority Leading 5
Junior 3
Necessary external support Single–or multi–party minority 2
Necessary abstention Single–or multi–party minority 1
In opposition 0
Source: Adapted and revised from Bartolini (1998,48–49).
5
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724000628 Published online by Cambridge University Press

status of the party, cabinet status in parliament, and party
status in cabinet). Therefore, the GPI of a given cabinet is
0 if the Left is in the opposition; 1 or 2 if the Left provides,
respectively, necessary abstention or necessary external
support to a minority cabinet; 3 to 10 if the Left is in
government, according to the different combinations of
cabinet status (i.e., multiparty minority, single-party
minority, surplus coalition, minimum winning coalition,
and single-party majority) and party status (i.e., junior or
leading), with higher values attributed to majority govern-
ments and leading statuses, and 10 corresponding to a
single-party majority government. The index is first cal-
culated for a given cabinet and then directly attributed to
the respective legislative term if the latter coincides with
the former. Conversely, if there are multiple cabinets in a
legislative term, the GPI is obtained by weighting the score
of each cabinet by its duration (in number of days) within
the term. As a result, the GPI is a continuous measure
ranging from 0 to 10.
The striking piece of evidence we draw from figure 1—
reporting the evolution over time of the GPI—is that,
since the initial politicization of the class cleavage, the
overall majority of legislative terms in Western Europe
(330 out of 616) are characterized by the absence of left
governmental power, as the left bloc was in opposition for
most of the period considered. The first instance of a GPI
that is different from 0 is recorded in France in 1906, but
only in the interwar period do we see a noticeable improve-
ment of the index. The march of social democracy toward
power accelerated just after World War II and reached its
heyday between the 1960s and the 1990s, as shown by the
locally weighed estimation fit of the GPI. Under the
programmatic formula of the “Third Way”(Giddens
1998), social democratic parties achieved unprecedented
success, and the index recorded its highest peak precisely in
the 1990s (4.73 on average), before declining in the
following two decades. In the 2010s, the power of the
Left decreased to the lowest point since the 1930s (3.45).
However, compared to recent accounts about the elec-
toral fall of left parties in Western Europe (Benedetto, Hix,
and Mastrorocco 2020; Delwit 2021; Polacko 2022), at
the governmental level the retrenchment is less pro-
nounced so far. This is because, as the trajectory of political
parties usually follows a sequence of phases with specific
thresholds, from electoral contestation to governmental
power (Rokkan 1970), the access to the executive for left
parties represented the last step of a long developmental
process. At the same time, once they achieved power and
consolidated as part of the “core”of their respective party
systems, left parties (particularly social democratic parties)
started to benefit from a favorable position that allowed
them to hold more power than they deserved based on
their recent electoral fortunes. Indeed, even in the 2010s,
left parties have been in power in all Western European
countries.
9
4. The Dependent Variable(s): Measuring
Varieties of Equality
In the operationalization of the dependent variable, our
approach entails both a multidimensional conception of
Figure 1
Evolution over Time of the GPI (Left)
6Perspectives on Politics
Article |Left Governmental Power and the Reduction of Inequalities
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724000628 Published online by Cambridge University Press

equality and a comparative longitudinal perspective. As a
result, we need to look at equality from different view-
points and employ data covering a long temporal span,
which is crucial to address our research question. How-
ever, on the one hand, the literature has mostly focused on
economic inequality by specifically looking at different
measures of income inequality (e.g., the Gini index and
90:10 or 90:50 income distribution ratios; the share of
national income held by the top decile or percentile;
annual labor income share as a percentage of the gross
domestic product; poverty reduction after tax and trans-
fers), thus overlooking political and social forms of
inequality. On the other hand, so far, this literature has
often relied on the same source, the Luxembourg Income
Study (LIS), which, despite being accurate, provides data
starting only from 1968 and lacks information for Cyprus,
Malta, and Portugal (e.g., Bradley et al. 2003; Iversen and
Soskice 2006; Mahler 2010).
On these bases, we contend that there is a need for
long-term measures of political, social, and economic
inequalities. Despite some clear empirical limitations,
the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) dataset (Coppedge
et al. 2019) is, to the best of our knowledge, the only
availablesourcethatprovidesthiskindofdata.
10
There-
fore, we employ three indicators for political inequality,
pointing to how political power is distributed in a given
society across different categories, namely socioeco-
nomic position, social group, and gender (see Coppedge
et al. 2019,190–91). These are interval variables coded
by country experts with a specific assessment scheme
and range from 0 to 4. The first, power equality by
socioeconomic position, measures the extent to which
wealthy people monopolize political power. In more
detail, the variable ranges between wealthy people
enjoying a virtual monopoly on political power and
wealthy people having no more political power than
those whose economic status is average or poor. The
second, power equality by social group, measures the
extent to which one social group (ethnic, racial, linguis-
tic, or religious) monopolizes political power. Here, at
one extreme, we find a situation in which one social
group comprising a minority of the population monop-
olizes political power, and at the other, a situation in
which all social groups have roughly equal political
power. The third, powerequalitybygender, measures
the extent to which men monopolize political power. It
ranges between men having a near monopoly of political
power and men and women having roughly equal polit-
ical power.
Furthermore, we also look at two indicators of social
inequality by considering the level of educational and
health equality in a given society (Coppedge et al. 2019,
192–93). Once again, both are country-experts-based
interval variables ranging from 0 to 4. Educational equality
considers the percentage of children receiving low-quality
education and ranges from a situation in which at least
75% of children receive such low-quality education that it
undermines their ability to exercise their basic rights as
adult citizens, to a situation in which only less than 5% of
children are in this scenario. Health equality considers the
percentage of citizens excluded from quality healthcare.
Here, at one extreme, at least 75% of citizens receive poor-
quality healthcare, which undermines their ability to
exercise their basic rights, and at the other, less than 5%
of citizens are in this scenario.
Finally, for economic inequality, we take into account
two indicators. The first, welfare universalism, also derived
from V-Dem (Coppedge et al. 2019, 150), measures the
extent to which welfare provisions tend to be universalistic.
It is a country-experts-based interval variable ranging from
0 to 5, namely from a situation in which there are no or
extremely limited welfare state policies to an opposite
situation in which almost all welfare state policies are
universal in character. The second indicator is a widespread
measure of income inequality, namely the Gini index after
taxes and transfers. The data collection related to this
variable was rather challenging, given that there is no single
source covering the whole analyzed time span, and there are
also some inconsistencies between the values attributed to a
given observation among different sources. Therefore, we
collected data from six different publicly available databases
(World Income Inequality Database, OECD, LIS, World
Bank, World Inequality Database, and Clio Infra).
When more than one source provided data for a given
observation, we simply took the average of the different
sources.
11
Figure 2 plots the evolution over time of the different
measures of equality introduced above. They are repro-
duced in three separate charts due to the different range of
the variables.
12
This visual representation tells a very clear
story: the last 150 years have represented a long march
toward the reduction of inequalities in Western Europe.
To different extents, all indicators move toward the more
egalitarian end of their respective scales. Of course, despite
the common path, the reduction of inequalities has fol-
lowed different timings and tempos according to various
factors. The increase in educational and health equality has
been more rapid and intense compared to the other types
of equality, so much so that today both measures have
almost reached the upper limit of their respective indices.
Conversely, there is still scope for improvement in other
varieties of equality, such as gender, socioeconomic posi-
tion, and income (as illustrated by the Gini index).
13
Overall, this picture seems to reject the idea that the
pursuit of equality is a mission that has been accomplished
in Western Europe and that, therefore, the Left is unable
to significantly reduce inequalities today simply because
there is no room for maneuver. Indeed, only in the case of
educational and health equality would it be acceptable to
talk about the Left having achieved a very satisfying
7
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outcome, as all other indicators are still far from the upper
end of their indices; as such, the Left still has substantial
opportunity to intervene via government policy to make
national societies more equal.
5. Controls and Method
The relationship between left governmental power and the
reduction of inequalities in Western Europe will be tested
by controlling for some factors that are either deemed
relevant by the literature on the topic or may constitute
relevant economic, social, and institutional constraints. For
a start, periods of economic shocks may hinder the ability
of left parties in government to rectify inequalities, as
economic downturns reduce the opportunity for redistri-
bution (Jahn 2018). Therefore, we include a dichotomous
variable, economic shocks, that assumes a value of 1 if at least
one year in the legislative term recorded a GDP growth rate
of −5% or below. Data are taken from the latest available
version of the Maddison Project Database, which is the
only available source for longitudinal GDP data that covers
our spatial-temporal framework.
14
Armed conflicts are also
an important potential confounder to account for, as they
have been shown to negatively impact inequalities (Bircan,
Brück, and Vothknecht 2017). This is why we include a
dichotomous variable, periods of war, which assumes a value
of 1 if, in at least one year of the legislative term, the
country is directly engaged in an armed conflict.
15
Additionally, we include two controls concerning the
relationship between political and societal actors: corrup-
tion and clientelism. We deem that political corruption
may exert a powerful constraint on the ability of govern-
ments to be responsive toward citizens’demands and to
Figure 2
Evolution over Time of Different Measures of Equality
8Perspectives on Politics
Article |Left Governmental Power and the Reduction of Inequalities
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724000628 Published online by Cambridge University Press

deliver effective public policies (see also Houle 2018).
More generally, high levels of political corruption may
curtail the capacity of governments to change the status
quo, a crucial prerequisite for left parties aiming to accom-
plish their flagship goal. In a similar vein, a context of
pervasive clientelism is conducive to personalistic, client-
based policy outcomes rather than an approach oriented
toward the collective benefit. With this in mind, we
control for the political corruption index and the clientelism
index, both provided by V-Dem (Coppedge et al. 2019).
Both are continuous measures: in the former, high values
indicate more corrupt societies by considering corruption
in the public sector, executive, legislature, and judiciary; in
the latter, high values indicate more pervasive clientelistic
relationships by means of targeted and contingent distri-
bution of resources (e.g., goods, services, jobs, or money)
in exchange for political support.
Furthermore, we also control for some institutional
constraints. First, many scholars state that the electoral
system plays a role for two main reasons. On the one hand,
Mahler (2010) shows that postelectoral coalition govern-
ments, the typical outcome under nonmajoritarian sys-
tems, have a higher level of efficacy compared to
pre-electoral coalition agreements, typical of majoritarian
or majority-assuring systems. On the other, the electoral
system affects the likelihood of a left government, which
decreases as the system becomes more disproportional
(Iversen and Soskice 2006; Jensen 2010). As a result, we
control for Gallagher’s(1991) least-squares index of dis-
proportionality under the assumption that the larger the
proportion of the dispersed and unrepresented vote, the
lower the chances of the Left being in government.
16
Second, we take into account the process of enfranchise-
ment, namely the progressive enlargement of suffrage. The
latter can be considered as an institutional precondition for
left parties’governmental power: this is because, as the
working class is traditionally the core constituency of the
Left, the electoral success of the latter is severely limited if
the former is not entitled to vote (Bartolini 2000). There-
fore, we include an ordinal variable (suffrage) that is 0 for
restricted suffrage, 1 for universal male suffrage, and 2 for
universal suffrage. Data comes from Bartolini (2000).
Third, as external constraints deriving from membership
in supranational institutions such as the European Union
(EU) allegedly force governing parties to prefer responsi-
bility even at the expense of responsiveness (Mair 2009),
we include an ordinal variable (EU constraints) assuming a
value of 0 if the country is not a member of the EU in a
given legislative term, 1 if it is a member of the EU but did
not adopt the Euro, and 2 if it also adopted the Euro.
Fourth, a further institutional constraint comes into play
when the Left’s egalitarian policies are to be implemented:
the extent to which public administration is rigorous and
impartial in the process of law implementation. The
capacity of public administration to implement and
enforce the law is a crucial condition in the passage from
policy output to effective social transformation. Following
Fernández-i-Marín and colleagues (2023), we take the
rigorous and impartial public administration measure from
V-Dem. This is a continuous variable where low values
indicate that the law is not respected by public officials and
arbitrary or biased administration of the law is the norm,
and high values indicate that the law is generally fully
respected by public officials and arbitrary or biased admin-
istration of the law is very limited (Coppedge et al. 2019,
162–63).
Finally, we include a trend variable, operationalized as
the starting year of the legislative term (year), as typically
done in time-series analyses (Roberts and Wibbels 1999).
This variable will also allow us to test our H1 in relation to
the change over time in the impact of left governmental
power on the reduction of inequalities. Table A3 in the
appendix reports the descriptive statistics of our dependent
and (unlogged) independent variables.
We test our models by taking into account that we have
a time-series cross-section dataset with repeated observa-
tions over time (legislative terms) on the same fixed units
(countries). More specifically, we have a time-serially
dominant pool (Stimson 1985), where temporal units
(on average, 29.8 legislative terms per country) are more
numerous than cross-section units (20 countries). In this
context, three kinds of issues may arise, namely hetero-
skedasticity, autocorrelation, and unobserved heterogene-
ity. Our diagnostic tests confirmed the presence of all such
issues.
17
We tackle these by running our models through
panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE) regression with
lagged dependent variables and country-fixed effects (Beck
and Katz 1995). This method has been by far the most
widely used in the literature dealing with our topic (see,
among many, Allan and Scruggs 2004; Kristal 2010; Lupu
and Pontusson 2011; Rueda 2008). In our data, we test
the impact of the GPI of the left bloc in a given observa-
tion, say the 2013–18 Italian legislative term, on the
various indicators of equality measured at the beginning
of the subsequent term, say Italy in 2018 (Emanuele and
Trastulli 2024).
18
6. Analysis and Results
To test our first hypothesis about the impact of left power
on equality, we ran seven separate models where our
indicators of political, social, and economic equality were
regressed on the GPI for the left bloc. The results of these
“baseline”models, controlling only for the lagged depen-
dent variable and country-fixed effects, are displayed in
table A4 in the appendix. The effect of GPI is always
positive and statistically significant for the V-Dem vari-
ables, while it is negative and significant for the Gini index,
where high values indicate higher inequality. Therefore,
the preliminary piece of evidence we draw from this
analysis is that, regardless of the specific indicator used,
9
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the governmental power of the Left has been positively
associated with the pursuit of equality. In the aggregate,
since the end of the nineteenth century, the story of left
parties and socialism appears to be inextricably linked with
the historical reduction of inequalities in Western Europe.
Moreover, the presence of country-fixed effects ensures
that the effect is robust across national specificities: in each
country, the higher the governmental power of the Left,
the higher the political, social, and economic equality.
Table 2 reports the full regression models with all the
control variables introduced before, while figure 3 shows
the coefficient plot that compares the effect of the GPI
across the different measures of equality. We find that
most of the indicators of equality (five out of seven) are still
significantly affected by the GPI of the left bloc. The full
models show that left power has a positive impact on the
extent to which political power is equally distributed
among socioeconomic positions and social (i.e., ethnic,
racial, linguistic, and religious) groups, on the share of the
population that receives high-quality education and
health, and the extent to which the welfare state is based
on universal measures. More specifically, the coefficient of
the GPI is significant at p< 0.001 for educational equality
and at p< 0.01 across all the other models except the one
regarding power equality by social group, where the GPI is
significant at p< 0.05. By looking at the coefficient plot of
figure 3—all dependent variables are standardized, so the
effects of the GPI across models can be compared—we can
see that left power exerts a slightly stronger effect on power
equality by socioeconomic position and educational equal-
ity. Conversely, after the inclusion of control variables, the
effect of left power on power equality by gender and
income distribution disappears.
19
More specifically, in
light of these results, it might be argued that leveling the
playing field in terms of political power, education, health,
and welfare is politically less contentious than redistribut-
ing income, which instead is a divisive and politically
adversarial measure likely to be perceived as a zero-sum
game and also subject to stronger external constraints from
financial and economic actors at the supranational and
international levels (e.g., Mair 2009).
20
These results are
fully confirmed by replacing the GPI with a measure
reporting, for each legislative term, the weighed share of
cabinet seats of the left bloc (table A12). As discussed
above, the latter can be considered the most accurate
measure of left power employed by the current literature
(Allan and Scruggs 2004; Garritzmann and Seng 2016;
Jensen 2010). The fact that this additional robustness test
corroborates our results further confirms that they are not
driven by the specific measure of left power used.
Overall, H1 is mostly confirmed, as the higher the
governmental power of the Left, the lower the (political,
social, and economic) inequalities. Our multidimensional
operationalization of inequalities has allowed us to specify
the exceptions to this finding and has confirmed the
importance of providing a multifaceted assessment of the
investigated relationship.
21
It is also interesting to notice that, among the control
variables, none has a consistent effect across models, as
different groups of factors exert significant effects on the
various measures of equality.
22
This result further con-
firms the underlying multidimensionality of equality,
where its components are each explained by a different
set of determinants.
23
Moreover, for all the measures of
equality for which a positive trend over time could be
detected at the descriptive level (see figure 2), such an
increase over time seems to be absorbed by the impact of
left governmental power, as the control for time (year)
appears not significant.
Assessing that left governmental power has a signifi-
cant effect on the reduction of inequalities does not
necessarily mean that the Left really makes a difference
when it comes to power. Indeed, given that levels of
inequality have been massively reduced over the course
of the last 150 years, as shown in figure 2, it might be
the case that left and right parties have similarly con-
tributed to this trend. To control for this potential
occurrence, we have calculated the GPI of the center-
right bloc, and we have rerun the regression models with
the GPI for this bloc as the focal predictor.
24
The results
are displayed in table A17 in the appendix. We find that
the GPI of the center-right bloc always shows a consis-
tently negative association with the various measures of
equality, although the coefficients are never significant at
p< 0.05. This means that the Center-Right has not
significantly increased inequalities in Western Europe,
but at the same time has not contributed to reducing
them either. Therefore, this analysis clarifies that, in the
aggregate period including the last 150 years, there has
been a sharp difference in how left and right parties in
government have shaped inequality.
Besides the overall assessment of the effect of left
governmental power on political, social, and economic
inequalities, we are also interested in testing how this
relationship varies over time, under the expectation that
the impact of the Left’s governmental power on inequal-
ities has decreased in recent decades (H2). As discussed in
the theoretical section, different factors may have contrib-
uted to the lower capacity of the Left to pursue its flagship
goal. To test H2, we rerun all regression models in table 2
with the addition of the interaction between the GPI and
our trend variable (year). The full regression table is
reported in table A18 in the appendix. The analysis shows
a negative and significant interaction for all measures of
equality that were significantly influenced by the GPI of
the Left in table 2 except for power by social group, which
means that, overall, the impact of left power on the
reduction of inequalities has decreased over time. This
temporal change is particularly prominent in the case of
power by socioeconomic position and welfare state
10 Perspectives on Politics
Article |Left Governmental Power and the Reduction of Inequalities
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724000628 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Table 2
Governmental Power Index (Left) and Measures of Equality: Full Models
Socioeconomic
pos. Social group Gender Education Health Welfare Income
B PCSE B PCSE B PCSE B PCSE B PCSE B PCSE B PCSE
Governmental
power index (Left)
0.061** 0.022 0.054* 0.024 0.007 0.02 0.068*** 0.02 0.066** 0.023 0.085** 0.031 0.000 0.003
Lagged DV 0.812*** 0.028 0.740*** 0.032 0.751*** 0.025 0.887*** 0.022 0.866*** 0.031 0.871*** 0.026 0.908*** 0.020
Economic shocks −0.002 0.019 −0.031 0.021 0.003 0.02 −0.01 0.019 −0.035 0.021 −0.048 0.031 0.000 0.003
Periods of war −0.009 0.031 −0.075** 0.028 −0.048+ 0.025 0.021 0.025 −0.024 0.035 0.019 0.055 0.006+ 0.003
Political corruption index −0.822** 0.313 −0.219 0.322 −0.428+ 0.248 −0.403 0.301 −0.079 0.329 −0.455 0.479 0.001 0.039
Clientelism index 0.07 0.155 0.065 0.167 −0.15 0.134 −0.224 0.173 −0.246 0.197 −0.269 0.267 0.034+ 0.020
Disproportionality (t −1) 0.001 0.002 0.006*** 0.002 0.001 0.002 0.004** 0.002 0.004+ 0.002 −0.001 0.003 0.000 0.000
Suffrage (ref: restricted)
Male suffrage 0.238*** 0.045 0.171*** 0.044 −0.032 0.038 0.009 0.051 0.130+ 0.067 0.142 0.095 0.001 0.005
Universal suffrage 0.311*** 0.052 0.212*** 0.05 0.123** 0.042 0.049 0.053 0.225*** 0.068 0.207* 0.096 −0.003 0.005
EU constraints (ref: not in
the EU)
EU member −0.022 0.023 −0.014 0.025 0.002 0.024 0.017 0.023 −0.039 0.027 0.000 0.036 0.004 0.003
Euro member −0.035 0.031 −0.062+ 0.037 −0.005 0.033 −0.099** 0.033 −0.104** 0.035 −0.059 0.05 0.013** 0.004
Rigorous public
administration
0.039** 0.013 0.081*** 0.016 0.018 0.013 0.023 0.016 0.022 0.017 0.033 0.024 −0.004+ 0.002
Year 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.000 0.003*** 0.001 0.001 0.000 0.001 0.001 0.000 0.001 0.000 0.000
Country–fixed effects
Constant 0.931 0.824 0.199 0.979 −6.978*** 1.165 −1.125 0.913 −1.165 1.074 0.541 1.341 0.200 0.126
Wald χ2 9039.6*** 7610.3*** 20024.5*** 14696.3*** 9775.7*** 16904.5*** 8005.6***
N of elections 588 588 588 541 541 541 508
N of countries 20 20 20 20 20 20 20
Notes: PCSE regressions with lagged dependent variable and country-fixed effects; PCSEs are reported. +p< 0.10; *p< 0.05, **p< 0.01, ***p< 0.001.
11
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universalism (in both cases, the interaction coefficient is
significant at p< 0.001).
Following Berry, Golder, and Milton (2012), to pro-
vide a correct interpretation of the results in the case of
interaction models, it is always better to look at the
marginal effect plots. The marginal effects of the GPI for
the left bloc on various measures of equality across time are
graphically reported in figure 4. What strikingly emerges
from the chart is that not only does the impact of the GPI
decrease over time (H2 is confirmed), but also its marginal
effect crosses the zero line in all plots, thus indicating that
the relationship becomes not significant at a certain time
point. More specifically, since the 1980s, left governmen-
tal power has ceased to be statistically associated with the
reduction of inequalities in Western Europe. The figure
shows that the decline over time is common to all indica-
tors of equality that displayed a significant GPI impact,
even for power equality by social group, although the latter
shows a less steep negative slope compared to the other
measures, especially in the case of power equality by
socioeconomic position and welfare state universalism.
25
In general, the ability of the Left to exploit its govern-
mental power to pursue egalitarian policies was very high
at the beginning of the period under analysis, namely at
the time of the first left governments in the initial decades
of the twentieth century. Then, it progressively decreased
until it completely faded at the time of the fall of the
Berlin Wall.
As a final point, in light of this finding, we have
replicated the same test for center-right parties to see
whether, in recent decades, left and right parties have
behaved similarly, meaning that both have not contrib-
uted to reducing inequalities. As table A19 in the appendix
shows, the marginal effect of the GPI of the center-right
bloc is never significant.
26
This demonstrates that, since
the 1980s, left and right parties have become indistin-
guishable from one another as far as the politics of
inequality is concerned.
7. Discussion and Conclusion
This article has investigated the relationship between left
power and inequalities in Western Europe. Despite the
considerable attention it has received in the literature,
existing studies have suffered from a limited temporal
span, the use of varied and often inadequate measures of
left power, and a bias toward economic forms of inequality
at the expense of political and social ones. We have
addressed these limitations by introducing three innova-
tions. First, to provide a comprehensive account of this
relationship and these changes over time, we have put
forward a comparative longitudinal analysis by examining
the effect of left power on various forms of inequality in
20 Western European countries over the last 150 years.
This broad temporal span embraces the whole political
history of the Left in the region and allows us to test
whether and how the hypothesized relationship changes
Figure 3
Coefficient Plot of the Regressions between Measures of Equality and GPI (Left)
Notes: For the sake of comparability, all dependent variables have been standardized, and income inequality (Gini index) has been inverted
so that high values mean higher income equality, consistent with the other dependent variables. Control variables, lagged dependent
variables, and country-fixed effects not shown.
12 Perspectives on Politics
Article |Left Governmental Power and the Reduction of Inequalities
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724000628 Published online by Cambridge University Press

over time. Second, by refining Bartolini’s(1998) original
proposal, we have presented an index of left governmental
power that returns, in a given legislative term, the power
exercised by left parties within their respective national
governments. The index captures the “effective”power of
the Left more adequately than the existing alternatives
presented by the literature, as it considers not only the
presence or absence of left parties within the executive but
also the cabinet’s status in parliament and the status of the
party or parties in cabinet, as well as the duration of each
cabinet within any given legislative term. Third, we have
accounted for the multidimensional nature of inequality
by employing different measures of this phenomenon
from political, social, and economic viewpoints.
Our time-series cross-section analysis has shown that,
overall, the Left in government has historically reduced
inequality, in line with prior expectations. However, while
such a relationship holds for all measures of inequality in
our baseline models, when we also control for potential
confounders, the picture becomes more nuanced. Indeed,
the positive effect of left governmental power on the
reduction of inequalities is confirmed for most aspects
(political power of socioeconomic classes and social
groups, education, health, and welfare), but not for all of
them (women’s political power and income distribution).
Moreover, the most interesting and original finding of
our empirical analysis concerns the change over time in the
hypothesized relationship between the power of the Left
and the reduction of inequalities. That is, we find a
consistent trend across the various measures of inequality
that, albeit with different rates of change, all point to the
same conclusion: the equalizing effect of the Left in gov-
ernment was very high in the initial decades of the twentieth
century and then progressively decreased over time, until it
became not significant in the 1980s and beyond. Addition-
ally, our empirical tests show that, in the last 40 years, left
and right parties have become indistinguishable from one
another as far as the politics of inequality is concerned.
Figure 4
Marginal Effects of GPI (Left) on Various Measures of Equality across Time
Note: For the sake of comparability, all dependent variables have been standardized, and income inequality (Gini index) has been inverted
so that high values mean higher income equality, consistent with the other dependent variables.
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Our findings suggest that, although left parties entered
into government less frequently in the initial decades of the
twentieth century than in post-World War II years, their
impact on the reduction of inequalities was particularly
strong in the earlier period precisely because the inequal-
ities to be tackled at that time were far greater than in later
decades. Then, as inequalities gradually lowered and the
external pressures for responsibility on left governments
simultaneously increased, the ability of the Left to pursue
egalitarian outcomes progressively decreased until it
completely faded at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
This indicates that, despite what is commonly argued, the
Left’s retreat from egalitarianism did not come about
abruptly with the “Third Way”but rather was the result
of a long-term process whose deep roots could only be
unveiled through a comparative longitudinal design.
In light of these findings, and taking account of the
possible underlying factors discussed in the theoretical
section, our interpretation points in a clear direction while
discounting potential alternatives. Indeed, on the one
hand, the descriptive analyses provided in the previous
sections have shown that, despite declining in the last few
decades, the Left’s loss of governmental power has not
been as great as its electoral decline (Benedetto, Hix, and
Mastrorocco 2020; Delwit 2021; Emanuele and Trastulli
2023) and in any case not so great as to undermine left
parties’ability to deliver egalitarian policies once in gov-
ernment. On the other hand, notwithstanding the remark-
able advancements made by Western European societies in
reducing inequalities over the past century, it cannot be
said that the Left is unable to pursue further egalitarian
policies because it has achieved its goals: according to our
data, only in the areas of educational and health equality
may it be argued that the Left has accomplished its
egalitarian mission. Our data clearly shows that the Left
has become increasingly unable to reduce inequalities even
in areas where there is still scope for improvement, as in the
case of power equality by socioeconomic position. In this
regard, it is also hard to imagine that left parties have
interrupted their egalitarian efforts due to a shift in the
preferences of a public that, according to the thermostatic
model (e.g., Wlezien 1995), have readjusted their issue
priorities following the achievement of high levels of
equality. Indeed, not only are highly egalitarian outcomes
still largely unaccomplished, but—as public opinion data
shows—public preferences are still oriented toward the
reduction of inequalities.
27
Conversely, what is plausibly the most likely interpre-
tation of governing left parties’recent inability to reduce
inequality is that they have become increasingly con-
strained by external institutions (e.g., the EU, global
markets). The progressive liberalization of financial mar-
kets and the setting of binding fiscal and economic
parameters for the European member states meant that
“an autonomous monetary policy became extremely hard
to pursue”(Boix 1998, 70). In this context, governing
parties have faced limited domestic autonomy as globali-
zation has forced them to assume common positions (Mair
2008, 218), especially within the area of welfare policy
(Huber and Stephens 2001). As a result of these long-term
irreversible transformations, governing parties’room for
maneuvering is, de facto, much more limited today than it
was in the past. This limited autonomy particularly
impacts the agenda of social democratic and socialist
parties, which emerged in the nineteenth century with
the purpose of realizing a radical transformation of the
status quo, pointing foremost to the reduction of political,
social, and economic inequalities. Over the course of the
twentieth century, their actions in government brought
about important accomplishments—public education and
healthcare systems, universal welfare states—and contrib-
uted to transforming Western Europe as a whole into the
most egalitarian region of the world (Alvaredo et al. 2018).
However, their transformative capacity is now behind
them. Since the 1980s, as shown by our analysis, reducing
political, social, and economic inequalities has proved to
be beyond the governmental power of the Left. In recent
decades, the pressure of external constraints and the related
responsibility have outweighed left parties’political will-
ingness to be responsive toward their flagship goals. And
most importantly, left parties with governing responsibil-
ity do not seem to have the strength and perhaps lack even
the will to challenge the dominant paradigm and change
the status quo. This may also be because the progressive
shift of their reference constituency from industrial
workers to sociocultural professionals and the decline in
the size and political relevance of unions reduce the
willingness of left parties to engage with traditional left
goals.
Overall, based on the presented evidence, we can
conclude that the Left in Western Europe is today inca-
pable of accomplishing its historical mission to reduce
inequalities. Further research is needed to delve deeper
into the implications of this finding with regard to the
future perspectives of the Left vis-à-vis their very raison
d’être.
Supplementary Material
To view supplementary material for this article, please visit
http://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724000628.
Acknowledgments
A previous version of this article was presented at the
CIRCaP “Jean Blondel”seminar series (University of
Siena, May 25, 2021), at the CISE seminar series
(LUISS, Rome, June 16, 2021), at the SISP General
Conference (virtual event, September 11, 2021), at the
CEVIPOF seminar series (Sciences Po Paris, April
14 Perspectives on Politics
Article |Left Governmental Power and the Reduction of Inequalities
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724000628 Published online by Cambridge University Press

12, 2022), and at the “Robert Elgie”Brown Bag Seminar
(La Sapienza University of Rome, October 19, 2022).
The authors thank Marco Improta for his valuable help
with the data collection, Leonardo Morlino for his pre-
cious advice on the theoretical framework, and Guðmun-
dur Jónsson for kindly sharing data with us. Moreover,
they thank Luca Verzichelli, Romain Lachat, Lou Safra,
Chiara Fiorelli, Mattia Guidi, Gianluca Passarelli, Sorina
Soare, Davide Angelucci, Aldo Paparo, Davide Vittori,
Elisabetta Mannoni, and Lorenzo De Sio for their useful
comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of the
manuscript. This research did not receive any specific
grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial,
or not-for-profit sectors. The authors declare they have
no competing interests.
Notes
1 See our discussion in the “Literature Report”section of
the appendix and table A20, also in the appendix.
2 Yet, other contributions show how left parties’new
middle-class voters also support—and often choose to
vote for the Left because of—redistributive stances
(e.g., Abou-Chadi and Hix 2021; Gingrich and
Häusermann 2015), indicating that the more recent
emphasis on sociocultural progressive positions should
be seen as complementing rather than hindering the
pursuit of traditional left goals.
3 Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France,
Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Luxem-
bourg, Malta, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain,
Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.
While existing studies on the topic usually focus on a
selection of Western European countries, often in
conjunction with other countries outside the region,
we provide the most inclusive case selection possible
within the region of interest, as we cover virtually all
Western European countries (the only exclusions
being microstates such as Andorra, Liechtenstein, and
San Marino).
4 Within this timeframe, we have excluded all periods of
democratic discontinuity (such as the fascist regime in
Italy) and all periods when parliamentary elections
were not held for more than six years.
5 Furthermore, we have also excluded right-wing splits
from social democratic parties (e.g., the Danish Center
Democrats in 1973) and ethno-regionalist parties (see
De Winter and Türsan 1998) with a leftist ideological
orientation, as neither originally emerged with the
mobilization of the working class as their primary goal.
6 Notice that minor parties that never reach 1% of the
national vote share in parliamentary elections (lower
house) have been excluded. Furthermore, for the sake
of robustness, we have also replicated our empirical
analysis by including parties of the so-called “new
politics,”and the results are substantively identical to
our main models. This is not surprising, as “new
politics”formations have hardly accessed government,
which, in the left bloc, has primarily remained the
remit of social democratic parties. The list of parties
resulting from this classification and the analyses
testing our hypotheses based on the related GPI of the
Left are reported in tables A6 and A7 and figure A11 in
the appendix.
7Table A2 in the appendix reports a detailed compar-
ison between Bartolini’s(1998) original measure and
our revised version.
8 Notice that the results presented in this article are
almost identical if the GPI is calculated on the main
left party or the main social democratic party rather
than on the whole left bloc (see tables A8 and A9 in the
appendix). This is because, with a few exceptions, only
the main left party (generally, the social democratic
party) in each country experienced government par-
ticipation, while the remaining left parties (if any) have
usually stayed in the opposition.
9 Further charts showing frequency distribution, cross-
country comparisons, and temporal variations in the
GPI for the left bloc are reported in the appendix (see
figures A1,A2, and A3).
10 V-Dem variables derive from country experts who
have coded the observations on the basis of a specific
assessment scheme related to each variable. Therefore,
they are not entirely “objective”and inevitably have a
subjective component, as all expert surveys do. See the
appendix for more details about the construction of
the dependent variables.
11 Notice that data about the first decades under analysis
(1871–1930) must be taken with particular caution as
there is only one data source available (i.e., Clio Infra).
12 Moreover, figures A4–A10 in the appendix report the
evolution over time of our dependent variables by
country.
13 The trend shown by income inequality, with
decreasing levels during the twentieth century fol-
lowed by fundamental stability in recent decades, is
substantially convergent with well-known work by
Piketty (2014), notwithstanding the different mea-
sures employed (i.e., the share of national income held
by the top decile or percentile).
14 As the Maddison Project Database presents gaps for
some years in Iceland (1916–42), Luxembourg
(1918–48), and Malta (1921–32), we have integrated
data from, respectively, Jónsson (2004), the Central
Service for Statistics and Economic Studies of Lux-
embourg, and Apostolides (2011).
15 Data are taken from V-Dem and consider both
internal and international armed conflicts.
16 Data are taken from Gallagher’s(2023) online archive.
17 Specifically, we performed a likelihood ratio test of
panel heteroskedasticity, a Wooldridge test of serial
15
https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592724000628 Published online by Cambridge University Press

correlation, and a Hausman test between fixed and
random effects. All diagnostic tests are significant at p
< 0.001 for at least one dependent variable and thus
confirm that panels are heteroskedastic, observations
are serially correlated, and unobserved heterogeneity
does not allow the use of random effects.
18 We are conscious that any assumption related to the
number of time lags needed to show the expected
effect of left power on inequality would be a discre-
tional choice of the researcher. In the literature on the
topic, there is a substantial lack of discussion related to
the time lag that best fits the relationship between
governmental power and inequality. By replicating the
empirical analysis with different structures of the time
lags between the GPI of the left bloc and the various
measures of inequality, the chosen specification
emerges as the best empirical fit for the assessment of
the impact of the Left’s GPI on different forms of
inequality.
19 The effects shown in table 2 remain similar if we rerun
the regression models by excluding all observations
where the dependent variables taken from V-Dem
have been coded by fewer than three expert coders (see
table A5 in the appendix). Similarly, substantive
results do not change if we run the regression models
only since the very first moment when a left party
accessed government in Western Europe (1906), or if
we exclude all observations that are labeled as non-
democratic by Polity V (tables A10 and A11 in the
appendix). Notice that, for the sake of readability of
the coefficients, in all regression models, the GPI has
been rescaled from the original 0–10 range to a 0–1
range.
20 The missing link between left power and income
inequality is already underlined by Hicks and Ken-
worthy (2003), Mahler (2010), Morlino (2020), and
Yi (2013).
21 Our findings are in line with several contributions
highlighting the positive effect of left power on the
reduction of welfare inequality (Allan and Scruggs
2004; Huber and Stephens 2000; Iversen and Soskice
2015; Jensen 2010), educational inequality (Ansell
2008; Braga, Checchi, and Meschi 2013; Busemeyer
2009; Hewitt 1977; Kauder and Potrafke 2013), and
health inequality (Huber and Stephens 2000).
22 As further robustness checks, we have also replicated
our main models through different operationalizations
of some of our control variables. In particular, in
table A13 in the appendix, economic shocks assumes a
value of 1 if at least one year in the legislative term falls
within one of the following periods that the political
economy literature traditionally classifies as large-scale
economic crises: the Long Depression (1873–96),
Great Depression (1929–39), oil crises (1973–82),
and Great Recession (2008–12). Moreover, in
table A14, we have measured periods of war in a more
conservative way by considering only instances of
internal armed conflict according to V-Dem. Fur-
thermore, in table A15, the index of disproportionality
has been replaced by a dichotomous measure of
electoral systems that is 1 for majoritarian systems and
0 for proportional representation systems. All our
findings remain substantively the same across these
models.
23 This is true even when controlling for another
potential determinant of equality, namely union den-
sity. We have collected data about this variable from
OECD/AIAS (2021) and Rasmussen and Pontusson
(2018) for earlier years. Despite the relevant number
of missing values, the replication of our main models
shows that left GPI is robust to the inclusion of union
density (see table A16 in the appendix). Interestingly,
while the presence of strong unions is not associated
with political forms of equality, it significantly con-
tributes to strengthening those forms that are closely
dependent upon social expenditures: public educa-
tion, healthcare systems, welfare universalism, and
income equality. This further corroborates our choice
to adopt a multidimensional conceptualization and
operationalization of inequality.
24 Within the center-right bloc, we have considered all
parties that ParlGov assigns to the following party
families: liberal, Christian democratic, agrarian, con-
servative, and right wing (Döring and Manow 2021).
25 Notice that, in the case of educational and health
equality, the decline over time of the marginal effect
could have been to some extent predictable in light of
the “ceiling effect”emerging from figure 2, where both
variables approximate their upper limit. However, this
situation occurred only in the 2000s, whereas the
marginal effect became not statistically significant well
before 2000, meaning that the Left stopped playing an
egalitarian role despite still having potential room to
maneuver before the turn of the millennium. Addi-
tionally, as expected given the results shown in table 2,
the marginal effects on gender and income
equality are always not significant across the whole
timeframe.
26 The only partial exception is the negative effect on
power equality by socioeconomic position, which is
significant at p< 0.10.
27 The International Social Survey Programme’s (ISSP)
modules on social inequality show that between 1987
and 2019, in Western Europe, the share of public
opinion favorable toward a government-led reduction
of inequalities remains substantially steady at around
two-thirds of the total across the various waves (68%
in 2019).
16 Perspectives on Politics
Article |Left Governmental Power and the Reduction of Inequalities
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Article |Left Governmental Power and the Reduction of Inequalities
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