DIVIDED: Preventing the Polarizing Effects of Economic Inequality

Political polarization - i.e. deep attitudinal or affective divides across political groups - is a key destabilising factor for contemporary democracies, and a leading cause of democratic backsliding. A related challenge for contemporary democracies is rising economic inequality. These two contemporary challenges to democracy go hand in hand: economic inequality is associated with political polarization. The microfoundations explaining the relationship between economic inequality and political polarization are, however, not well understood. Opening the 'mechanism black-box' of the inequality-polarization link is essential to design appropriate interventions that can break this link, stop the growth of both inequality and polarization, and stabilise democracies. Mainstream interventions have, to date, had limited effectiveness. The current implied mechanism behind the inequality-polarization link is class conflict: polarization ensues under inequality because the wealthier classes allegedly become less open to redistribution - having significantly more to lose from such policy change - while the working classes, having faced larger losses (in welfare, spending power, and relative social standing), allegedly have an incentive to 'soak the rich'. This mechanism, however, lacks explanatory power. Cumulative findings do not point at increases in awareness of one's economic self-interest as economic inequality rises, but quite the opposite: class-based voting and economic awareness started to decline, with second-dimension issues raising in salience instead. I originally argue that economic inequality is connected to political polarization through changes in individuals' social networks caused by inequality. Specifically, I argue that social contexts/networks become less diverse - more 'insulated' - under inequality and that it is this societal impoverishment that triggers political polarization. I call this the 'social conduction' theory of the inequality-polarization link. The fellowship will allow me to investigate this ground-breaking hypothesis of the inequality-polarisation link by probing two sub-mechanisms: (a) the social contact/interaction micro-mechanism; (b) the social comparison micro-mechanism. The social contact micro-explanation would argue that insulated social contexts/networks lead to polarization under economic inequality because individuals will have less opportunities to avail of credible and varied policy-relevant cues via contact/interactions with neighbours with different lived and policy experiences. The social comparison micro-mechanism would argue instead that insulated social context/networks are more conducive to polarization under inequality as comparing one's economic station with that of others is easier among homogeneous groups. The latter micro-mechanism, furthermore, has the potential to resolve the internal inconsistencies of the class conflict theory, and to explain its lack of empirical support. These aims will be met by a total of six work programmes. WP1 will develop an original method for the unobtrusive measure of attitudes/behaviours: the gamified survey. WP2 will be devoted to an ambitious data architecture project which entails the integration of existing comparative dataset on socio-economic conditions and attitudes with an original cross-country survey and with Meta granular data on friendship networks; and the establishment of a Europe-wide stable infrastructure of election studies/surveys. WP3, a measurement calibration package, will test various measures and data sources of social networks. WP4 will analyse the data collected from WP2/WP3 by deploying causal mechanism analysis. WP5 will entail a cross-country choice experiment and WP6 will be devoted to the gamified deliberative lab experiment. The richness of data and method will counteract risks and single points of failure.