Despite the undisputed societal and political significance of economic inequality, we still lack knowledge about its political determinants – especially the role of political parties. While we know much about what voters think about (in)equality, we know little about how parties conceive of it and how this affects policies and inequalities. To address this gap, the research group Varieties of Egalitarianism draws on the wisdom of the (online) crowd to map parties‘ concepts of equality and assess their effects on policy choices and inequality outcomes.

We gathered data on parties‘ equality concepts in twelve OECD countries since 1970. Categorization was done via online crowdcoding of political texts, combining automatic classifiers with human coding of specific equality concepts. Analyzing 850,000 programmatic statements, we distinguish positive references to (class-based) economic equality from other equality-related statements. This allows us to map parties and governments regarding the importance given to economic equality, equal rights, and equal chances.

Our stylized findings so far are summarized in the leaky equality pipeline shown on this page. Equality, despite public demand, gets lost in transmission at three stages of the policy process: programmatic response, selective policy responses, and the varying impacts of policies on different types of (in)equality. For details, please consult our publication page.