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Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities: A Study of Fifty Democracies, 1948–2020
The empirical starting point for anyone who wants to understand political cleavages in the democratic world, based on a unique dataset covering fifty countries since World War II.
Who votes for whom and why? Why has growing inequality in many parts of the world not led to renewed class-based conflicts, seeming instead to have come with the emergence of new divides over identity and integration? News analysts, scholars, and citizens interested in exploring those questions inevitably lack relevant data, in particular the kinds of data that establish historical and international context. Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities provides the missing empirical background, collecting and examining a treasure trove of information on the dynamics of polarization in modern democracies.
The chapters draw on a unique set of surveys conducted between 1948 and 2020 in fifty countries on five continents, analyzing the links between voters' political preferences and socioeconomic characteristics, such as income, education, wealth, occupation, religion, ethnicity, age, and gender. This analysis sheds new light on how political movements succeed in coalescing multiple interests and identities in contemporary democracies. It also helps us understand the conditions under which conflicts over inequality become politically salient, as well as the similarities and constraints of voters supporting ethnonationalist politicians like Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump.
Bringing together cutting-edge data and historical analysis, editors Amory Gethin, Clara Mart�nez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty offer a vital resource for understanding the voting patterns of the present and the likely sources of future political conflict.
Who votes for whom and why? Why has growing inequality in many parts of the world not led to renewed class-based conflicts, seeming instead to have come with the emergence of new divides over identity and integration? News analysts, scholars, and citizens interested in exploring those questions inevitably lack relevant data, in particular the kinds of data that establish historical and international context. Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities provides the missing empirical background, collecting and examining a treasure trove of information on the dynamics of polarization in modern democracies.
The chapters draw on a unique set of surveys conducted between 1948 and 2020 in fifty countries on five continents, analyzing the links between voters' political preferences and socioeconomic characteristics, such as income, education, wealth, occupation, religion, ethnicity, age, and gender. This analysis sheds new light on how political movements succeed in coalescing multiple interests and identities in contemporary democracies. It also helps us understand the conditions under which conflicts over inequality become politically salient, as well as the similarities and constraints of voters supporting ethnonationalist politicians like Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump.
Bringing together cutting-edge data and historical analysis, editors Amory Gethin, Clara Mart�nez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty offer a vital resource for understanding the voting patterns of the present and the likely sources of future political conflict.
656 pages, Hardcover
First published November 16, 2021
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About the author
Amory Gethin
3 books4 followersI completed my PhD in December 2023 at the Paris School of Economics. I was a visiting student at UC Berkeley in 2022-2023, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2022, and Harvard Business School in 2021.
I am on the 2023-2024 Job Market.
My research focuses on understanding the interactions between public policies, inequality, and political representation in the long run. My job market paper quantifies the role played by education in the decline of worldwide poverty and gender inequality since 1980.
I am on the 2023-2024 Job Market.
My research focuses on understanding the interactions between public policies, inequality, and political representation in the long run. My job market paper quantifies the role played by education in the decline of worldwide poverty and gender inequality since 1980.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
August 8, 2022
Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities: A Study of Fifty Democracies, 1948-2020, is a massive and interesting statistical expansion of Thomas Piketty's Brahmin Left vs. Merchant Right, which examines political trends in three countries - France, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, and shows the emergence of an elite competition between the intellectual elite, who support left leaning parties and environmentalist parties of the "new left," and the wealthy elite, who continue to support right wing and conservative parties. This interesting split of the elite in democracies is examined in 50 case studies of all the tagged countries above, each section authored by one or multiple political analysts who examine polling data, voting habits and other statistical data sets, as well as historical literature. This creates a work of political economy that not only examines Piketty's wider thesis from numerous other nations, but also provides an interesting and concise history of electoral politics of each of the 50 nations examined. This book does not focus solely on the West, although this is where the thesis fits best. It does examine newer and none Western democracies in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East.
The book shows that the thesis fits well, but not in all cases has this political trend come to fruition, and where it has, there are large differences. The political systems of a nation play a big role; do they utilize a first-past-the-post, or proportional systems for how political seats are distributed? Are there active separatist movements, or ethnic/religious/social cleavages that skew the vote? Are there external threats to sovereignty? Are they backsliding into autocracy? All of the above and more play a factor. This book was a fascinating and all encompassing theoretical examination of the thesis, but additionally serves as a good resource to look at the electoral history of each nation in question, and engage with comparisons between and within democracies based on the effects of social cleavages of numerous sorts. I could write pages on the interactions and differences between and within countries as they are presented in this book, and suffice to say, this one is a keeper. Events and situations change within all countries, and across the globe, but with democracy going strong in many nations for the last 50-100 years, there is a lot of good data to analyze to determine historical trends that transcend traumatic events, like wars, coups or disasters, and show the continuities of history, and the effects of events on those histories, from the perspective of electoral politics. Fascinating and heady stuff, and worth a read for those looking to brush up on the history of democracy, something that is often focused on only a few big countries (US, UK, France etc.) and is often focused on universalist ideas as opposed to ground level events.
The book shows that the thesis fits well, but not in all cases has this political trend come to fruition, and where it has, there are large differences. The political systems of a nation play a big role; do they utilize a first-past-the-post, or proportional systems for how political seats are distributed? Are there active separatist movements, or ethnic/religious/social cleavages that skew the vote? Are there external threats to sovereignty? Are they backsliding into autocracy? All of the above and more play a factor. This book was a fascinating and all encompassing theoretical examination of the thesis, but additionally serves as a good resource to look at the electoral history of each nation in question, and engage with comparisons between and within democracies based on the effects of social cleavages of numerous sorts. I could write pages on the interactions and differences between and within countries as they are presented in this book, and suffice to say, this one is a keeper. Events and situations change within all countries, and across the globe, but with democracy going strong in many nations for the last 50-100 years, there is a lot of good data to analyze to determine historical trends that transcend traumatic events, like wars, coups or disasters, and show the continuities of history, and the effects of events on those histories, from the perspective of electoral politics. Fascinating and heady stuff, and worth a read for those looking to brush up on the history of democracy, something that is often focused on only a few big countries (US, UK, France etc.) and is often focused on universalist ideas as opposed to ground level events.
February 8, 2022
The core idea by Piketty is interesting, but I felt I didn't learn too much beyond what I learnt from reading the two previous papers:
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piket...
https://wid.world/document/brahmin-le...
The book could have been more unified - the chapters felt a bit too disparate.
http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/Piket...
https://wid.world/document/brahmin-le...
The book could have been more unified - the chapters felt a bit too disparate.
March 11, 2022
A monograph of incredible breadth that cuts through all the cliches and gives a data driven overview of the fighting grounds in democracies around the world, as well as the commonalities and differences between different geographical areas.
January 17, 2024
This book contains an extensive analysis of the voting patterns in 50 countries in the post-war era. The chapters provide some context to the emergence of the dominant parties in each country and then analyze the evolution of party support according to factors like education, income, gender, region, race/ethnicity, religion, occupation, age, and other factors --- discerning which ones are most dominant in different situations.
The collection is especially interested in the theory of the emergence of a "multi-elite" party system, where high-income voters remain allied to the right ("Merchant Right") but high-education voters move toward the left ("Brahmin Left"). Several factors are named as drivers of such an evolution: the rise of identity-based conflicts and more social as opposed to economic issues, growing inequalities in access to higher education, structural changes to the global economy resulting from neoliberalism (and the impact on social democratic parties). On the second point, the co-editors, in their survey chapter, note that "the higher educated have indeed been more left-wing than the lower educated only among voters born after World War II, while prewar generations continue in large part to vote along class lines."
Other dominant themes include immigrants and Muslim voters in Western democracies increasingly voting for parties on the left, rural areas remaining bastions of the right, and younger voters being pro-integration and more willing to vote for less dominant parties.
Given spatial constraints, each of the chapters, which unite countries with similar parameters or trajectories, is about the length of a journal article and could benefit from a full book in and of itself. But this is a great compendium for asking questions and getting some initial answers.
The collection is especially interested in the theory of the emergence of a "multi-elite" party system, where high-income voters remain allied to the right ("Merchant Right") but high-education voters move toward the left ("Brahmin Left"). Several factors are named as drivers of such an evolution: the rise of identity-based conflicts and more social as opposed to economic issues, growing inequalities in access to higher education, structural changes to the global economy resulting from neoliberalism (and the impact on social democratic parties). On the second point, the co-editors, in their survey chapter, note that "the higher educated have indeed been more left-wing than the lower educated only among voters born after World War II, while prewar generations continue in large part to vote along class lines."
Other dominant themes include immigrants and Muslim voters in Western democracies increasingly voting for parties on the left, rural areas remaining bastions of the right, and younger voters being pro-integration and more willing to vote for less dominant parties.
Given spatial constraints, each of the chapters, which unite countries with similar parameters or trajectories, is about the length of a journal article and could benefit from a full book in and of itself. But this is a great compendium for asking questions and getting some initial answers.
June 1, 2025
In general, I am a fan of this kind of approach, employed very successfully in the past by Piketty: making simplifying assumptions and using intuitive, simple statistics to look at broad trends. However, I wonder if here it has been taken a bit too far. To be sure, it is the only way to really look at a subject like this, otherwise the book would have been 50000 pages. But at the same time there is so much that is ignored that the risk of drawing erroneous conclusions seems to become very high.
Italy, Israel, just to give two examples: to only look at electoral statistics and think you understand anything at all about their political history is surely delusional.
To give another example, even though the analysis goes up to 2019, the latest election seems to have already completely invalidated the conclusions about Portugal.
It's a very ambitious book and a remarkable achievement, and the authors are very candid about the shortcomings of their approach, but I still wonder how much can really be learned here.
Italy, Israel, just to give two examples: to only look at electoral statistics and think you understand anything at all about their political history is surely delusional.
To give another example, even though the analysis goes up to 2019, the latest election seems to have already completely invalidated the conclusions about Portugal.
It's a very ambitious book and a remarkable achievement, and the authors are very candid about the shortcomings of their approach, but I still wonder how much can really be learned here.
April 23, 2025
This book is best viewed as a reference material. The author stresses in the end that the hope for the book was to inspire more research on all these democracies. The books contains A LOT of graphs and there's more data on a website it listed. Overall, it explained which party attracts groups such as young vs old and educated vs non-educated but it doesn't go into great depth (understandably so since so many countries are covered) as to why.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews