Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict
\n(Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017)
\nThomas Piketty, March 2018
\nhttp:\/\/piketty.pse.ens.fr\/files\/Piketty2018.pdf
\nAbstract. Using post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the US, this paper documents a striking long-run evolution in the structure of political cleavages. In the 1950s-1960s, the vote for left-wing (socialist-labour-democratic) parties was associated with lower education and lower income voters. It has gradually become
\nassociated with higher education voters, giving rise to a \u201cmultiple-elite\u201d party system in the 2000s-2010s: high-education elites now vote for the \u201cleft\u201d, while highincome\/high-wealth elites still vote for the \u201cright\u201d (though less and less so). I argue that this can contribute to explain rising inequality and the lack of democratic response to it, as well as the rise of \u201cpopulism\u201d. I also discuss the origins of this evolution (rise of globalization\/migration cleavage, and\/or educational expansion per se) as well as future prospects: \u201cmultiple-elite\u201d stabilization; complete realignment of the party system along a \u201cglobalists\u201d (high-education, high-income) vs \u201cnativists\u201d (loweducation, low-income) cleavage; return to class-based redistributive conflict (either from an internationalist or nativist perspective). Two main lessons emerge. First, with multi-dimensional inequality, multiple political equilibria and bifurcations can occur. Next, without a strong egalitarian-internationalist platform, it is difficult to unite loweducation, low-income voters from all origins within the same party.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rising Inequality & the Changing Structure of Political Conflict (Evidence from France, Britain and the US, 1948-2017) Thomas Piketty, March 2018 http:\/\/piketty.pse.ens.fr\/files\/Piketty2018.pdf Abstract. Using post-electoral surveys from France, Britain and the US, this paper documents a striking long-run evolution in the structure of political cleavages. In the 1950s-1960s, the vote for left-wing (socialist-labour-democratic) parties was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5525","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-international-economics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rchss.sinica.edu.tw\/wwchu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5525","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rchss.sinica.edu.tw\/wwchu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rchss.sinica.edu.tw\/wwchu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rchss.sinica.edu.tw\/wwchu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rchss.sinica.edu.tw\/wwchu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5525"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rchss.sinica.edu.tw\/wwchu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5525\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5526,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rchss.sinica.edu.tw\/wwchu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5525\/revisions\/5526"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.rchss.sinica.edu.tw\/wwchu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5525"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rchss.sinica.edu.tw\/wwchu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5525"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.rchss.sinica.edu.tw\/wwchu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5525"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}