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Inequality and Actually Existing Democracy:
A New Framework of Analysis1
by Jeff Seward
-- History clearly confirms . . . modern democracy rose along with capitalism, and in
causal connection with it. . . [M]odern democracy is a product of the capitalist process. -Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy
-- Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich--that is the democracy
of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy,
we shall see everywhere . . . restriction after restriction upon democracy. These
restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, . . . but in their
sum total, these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active
participation in democracy. Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy
splendidly, when . . . he said that the oppressed are allowed every few years to decide
which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress
them in parliament. -Lenin, State and Revolution
-- The kind of economic organization that provides economic freedom directly, namely,
competitive capitalism, also promotes political freedom because it separates economic
power from political power and in this way enables the one to offset the other. Historical
evidence speaks with a single voice on the relation between political freedom and a free
market. I know of no example in time or place of a society that has been marked by a
large measure of political freedom, and that has not also used something comparable to
a free market to organize the bulk of economic activity. -Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
-- Never in a monarchy can the opulence of an individual put him above the prince; but,
in a republic, it can easily put him above the laws. Then the government no longer has
force, and the rich are always the true sovereign. -Rousseau, Letter to d'Alembert
-- We can have a democratic society or we can have great concentrated wealth in the
hands of a few. We cannot have both. -Justice Louis Brandeis, U.S. Supreme Court
Introduction. There is a growing literature about the relationship between rising
economic inequality in the United States and the health of American democracy, most of
it suggesting that this rising inequality is crippling or at least seriously distorting
1
The author would like to express special thanks to Jared Knowles, now a Ph.D. candidate at
the University of Wisconsin, for his contribution to this article as a research assistant when he
was an undergraduate student at Pacific University in the early stages of this project. His diligent
and insightful work gathering materials and his thoughtful reactions to early outlines of the
argument of this paper were invaluable in moving this research forward.
2
democratic political processes. This article intends to show that this literature is
handicapped by a tendency to compare existing American realities to an ideal of political
equality that has never been a plausible description of American democracy. As a result,
every discovered deviation from absolute political equality tends to be treated as a new
pathology in contrast to an implicit past in which political equality is somehow assumed
to have reigned more or less undistorted. This procedure makes it difficult to assess
whether or not the current deviations from the ideal are really pathologies at all or just
the routine functioning of constitutional democracy in the context of a capitalist society. It
also makes it difficult to assess whether or not what we most value about "actually
existing democracy" is in fact in serious danger or in greater danger today than in the
past and, if so, what realistically might be done about those threats.
In what follows, after a survey of the recent literature on inequality and
democracy, this article will 1) recontextualize these debates about inequality within the
very substantial literature in post-World War II political science that has long detailed the
way inequality has always (and not just episodically) conditioned and limited the degree
of political equality actually experienced in American democracy; 2) articulate two
different but interrelated frameworks for describing what, despite this inevitable
departure from the ideal of political equality in capitalist democracies, is nevertheless of
great value in "actually existing democracy" by drawing on modern democratic theory
and theories of the state; and 3) suggest an analytical framework in light of this analysis
of "actually existing democracy" that might be a more fruitful way to analyze the
problems that rising inequality may or may not pose for modern constitutional
democracies operating in a capitalist context in the United States or elsewhere.
The problem in the literature. There has always been both great tension and
great symbiosis in the complex relationship between modern capitalism and modern
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democracy. On the one hand, as many scholars of the subject have noted, modern
constitutional democracy arose in close connection with the rise of modern capitalism
and nowhere has succeeded in surviving except within capitalist societies. On the other
hand, the central principle of democracy--political equality--is in direct tension, even
contradiction, with the driving force behind capitalist dynamism--economic inequality.2
The historian Edmund Morgan has noted that, because of tensions of this sort
(and other sorts), all political authority rests on certain "fictions" that pretend that a
political order approximates some ideal much more closely than a hard-nosed
examination of political realities would actually warrant:
Make believe that the king is divine, make believe that he can do no wrong or
make believe that the voice of the people is the voice of God. Make believe that
the people have a voice or make believe that the representatives of the people
are the people. Make believe that governors are the servants of the people.
Make believe that all men are equal or make believe that they are not. (Morgan
1988, 13)
These "fictions," according to Morgan, simultaneously provide justification for why rulers
should be obeyed and constraints on rulers since the ruled expect rulers, in a reasonably
substantial way, to live up to the "fictions" that sustain their legitimacy. The ruled also
find in the "fictions" rhetorical resources for challenging features of the political order that
fall short of the ideal (Morgan1988, 13-15).
For American democracy (and, for that matter, for all constitutional democracies
embedded in capitalist societies), one of the most important and enduring fictions has
always been that this tension between political equality and economic inequality does
not exist or does not really matter much. Almost magically, the political system is seen
as hermetically sealed off from the economic system so that the inequality of wealth and
organized economic power in the one never "bleeds" into the perfect equality reigning in
the other. The transformation of economic power into political power is assumed not to
2
For an especially lucid overview of the basic ways democracy and capitalism both reinforce and
undermine each other, see Gabriel Almond's "Capitalism and Democracy" (Almond 1991).
4
happen or at least not to happen to any extent that would undermine the political order's
claim to be fully democratic and equal.
Viewed through this sort of fictional lens, American history can be seen as the
side-by-side development, on the one hand, of a highly successful free market capitalist
economy and, on the other hand, a highly successful constitutional democracy. The
market economy has created more and more economic opportunity for more and more
sectors of the American population despite (or even because of) high levels of inequality.
The constitutional democracy, despite limitations in the early Republic, has gradually
extended the principle of political equality to include first all adult white males (not just
those with property), then the descendants of slaves, a whole rainbow of diverse
immigrant groups, and, in the end, even women. Living up to the "fiction" of political
equality has been viewed mostly as a matter of extending the suffrage and other formal
political rights to groups within the adult population previously excluded by now obsolete
prejudices.
Defects of American democracy due to economic inequality have figured less
centrally in this narrative. An especially clear example of this is Kevin Phillips's popular
history of the effects of wealth in American politics (Phillips 2002). Instead of seeing the
effects of economic inequality as a permanent and central feature of democracy in a
capitalist society, Phillips's account sees those effects as episodic and temporary
departures from normal democratic practices and ultimately trumped by the power of
formal political equality. In this way, periods of extreme inequality are in a certain sense
segregated from the mainstream of American history as exceptional moments in which
the strict separation of political equality and economic inequality broke down, and
political authority was suddenly "up for sale" to the highest bidder from among the new
and greedy nouveau riche. These anomalous episodes, however, were subsequently
"fixed" by periods of extensive political reform, which systematically restored the healthy
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balance of American life, checked the insidious influence of private economic power, and
reestablished the impermeable barrier between the dynamic capitalist economy and the
ever more inclusive constitutional democracy.
This narrative of American political economy is not confined to popular histories
or high school history textbooks. One of the best and most sophisticated recent studies
of the current relationship between growing economic inequality and American
democracy has as its subtitle "The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age" and, in its
concluding chapter, which includes a ringing call for a new era of reform, Larry Bartels
explicitly embraces Kevin Phillips's narrative:
Likening the economic circumstances of the current era to the most conspicuous
past eras of escalating inequality, the original Gilded Age and the Roaring
Twenties, Phillips observed that those periods of concentrated wealth and
political corruption ended with the Progressive Era and the New Deal,
respectively, and suggested that "A politics in this tradition is unlikely to blink
at confronting twenty-first century elites." (Bartels 2008, 294)
This sense of the historical narrative leads Bartels to the following
conceptualization of one of the central projects of his study:
One of the most important questions explored in this book is whether political
equality can be achieved, or even approximated, in a society marked by glaring
economic inequalities. When push comes to shove, how impermeable are the
boundaries separating the economic and political spheres of American life?
(Bartels 2008, 24)
By embracing the "fiction" of political equality and the "impermeable" barrier between the
political realm and the economic realm, only one set of conclusions is possible--we are
not very close to approximating political equality and the boundaries between the
political order and the economic order are highly permeable.
This sort of conclusion is on display very clearly in the chapter of the book most
directly relevant to the issue of political inequality, titled "Economic Inequality and
Political Representation." (Bartels, 252-282) There Bartels employs a very sophisticated
methodology to demonstrate convincingly that members of the United States Senate are
6
highly responsive to the political views of the wealthy, moderately responsive to the
political views of the middle class, and almost completely unresponsive to the political
views of the poor. At no point does Bartels even attempt to show that this disparity has
increased over time or that it is in any way related to increasing inequality in recent
decades (in fact, his analysis is based on data from the late 1980s and early 1990s). He
contents himself with a concluding comment that this disparity "must be profoundly
troubling to anyone who accepts [Robert] Dahl's stipulation that 'a key characteristic of a
democracy is the continued responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its
citizens, considered as political equals.'" (Bartels, 282)
Quantifying the extreme nature of this disparity in responsiveness is a major
contribution to the literature that shows that economic inequality leads to political
inequality. But should this have ever been doubted? That raw fact, however dramatic,
does not really support the claims of Bartels or Phillips that the increasing economic
inequality of recent decades is some sort of anomaly that poses a new or increased
threat to American democracy. The analysis is also perfectly consistent with the notion
that political inequality grounded in economic inequality is simply a routine feature of
political life in any democracy situated within a capitalist economic system.
In a similar vein, the American Political Science Association convened a "Task
Force on Inequality and American Democracy" in 2004 to organize research around
what was perceived to be the growing impact of economic inequality on American
democracy. One of the best publications that grew directly out of this task force and
included several of its original members opened its first chapter ("American Democracy
in an Era of Rising Inequality") with language that implicitly embraced this same
narrative:
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Equal political voice and democratically responsive government are widely
cherished American ideals--yet as the United States aggressively promotes
democracy abroad, these principles are under growing threat in an era of
persistent and rising inequalities at home. . .
Generations of Americans have worked to equalize citizen voice across lines
of income, race, and gender. Today, however, the voices of American citizens
are raised and heard unequally. The privileged participate more than others and
are increasingly well organized to press their demands on government. Public
officials, in turn, are much more responsive to the privileged than to average
citizens and the less affluent. . . The scourge of overt discrimination against
African Americans and women has been replaced by a more subtle but potent
threat--the growing concentration of the country's wealth, income, and political
influence in the hands of the few. (Jacobs and Skocpol 2005, 1)
The clear implication of this passage is that the American ideal of political equality was
largely accomplished by generations of Americans who "worked to equalize citizen
voice," but "today" these voices are "raised and heard unequally" (but not in the past?).
After overcoming all the previous political inequalities rooted in class, race, and gender,
these overcome inequalities have now been "replaced" by apparently brand new
inequalities rooted in a current and anomalous surge in economic inequality.
Despite the reference to "persistent" inequalities, the overall analysis of the book
provides no real answer to the question of whether or not the political inequalities that
are uncovered are new and disturbing consequences of recent increases in economic
inequality. For example, the chapter entitled "Inequalities of Political Voice" (authored by
Kay Leman Schlozman, Benjamin I. Page, Sidney Verba, and Morris P. Fiorina) states
as its first major (but hardly surprising) conclusion, "Most important, the level of political
inequality in America is high." (Jacobs and Skocpol 2005, 69) Is this, however, a new
phenomenon or a phenomenon that has been exacerbated by recent increases in
economic inequality? The authors have no answer to that question, concluding in their
last sentence only, "If we cannot be sure that they have become more pronounced in an
era of widening disparities of income and wealth, we are certain that those political
8
inequalities have long been and continue to be substantial, a challenge to the
democratic ideal of citizen equality." (Jacobs and Skocpol 2005, 70)
The growing literature on inequality and democratic politics has made many
contributions to our understanding of the linkages between the two. One body of
literature has attempted to trace the political causes of inequality (see, for example,
Hacker and Pierson 2010, and, for comparative perspectives across a range of Western
democracies, Birchfield 2008 and Beramendi and Anderson 2008). Another influential
recent book has highlighted the deleterious effects that increasing inequality has across
a broad range of social indicators from social violence to mental illness to illiteracy to
social mobility (Wilkinson and Pickett 2010).
More directly relevant to the issues raised in the current article is a rich literature
detailing specific ways inequality affects various aspects of democratic life: political
participation, political influence, political representation, etc. The Bartels book and the
volume edited by Jacobs and Skocpol reviewed above are especially outstanding
contributions. With respect to this last category, however, virtually all of this recent
literature uses a similar framework of comparing departures from political equality
against the fictional ideal. Few if any attempt a more realistic analysis of what degrees
and forms of political equality are in fact critical for (or, conversely, what degrees and
forms of political inequality are really dysfunctional for) "actually existing democracies."
This sort of rhetorical framework of contrasting a glowing ideal to a corrupted
reality makes perfect sense as part of a political strategy for mobilizing a reform
movement; it is a move that Morgan describes as advocating "moving the facts to fit the
fiction" (Morgan 1988, 14). "How far (and how suddenly) we have fallen from our
cherished ideals" is a compelling slogan. It is less satisfying as an analytical framework
for assessing the significance of contemporary changes in the level of political equality.
Just how much and what kind of political equality is really important for the most critical
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functions of contemporary democracies? How much less political equality of just what
sort is an actual threat to those key functions of "actually existing democracies" that are
at the core of what we value in them? What degree and what forms of economic
inequality specifically threaten to decrease which degrees and forms of political equality?
What sorts of barriers exist or could be constructed to diminish the ability to translate
economic power into political power where that transformation strikes at the heart of
what is most democratic about our existing political orders? All of these questions go to
the heart of understanding what, if anything, is politically threatening about increasing
economic inequality. Merely pointing to a failure to achieve the ideal of perfect political
quality, however, does not get us very close to useful answers to any of these questions.
Recontextualizing the problem. This marked tendency to assess the political
impact of economic inequality by treating economically-based departures from full
political equality as anomalous episodes of pathology is difficult to understand. There is
a tremendously rich tradition in American political science since World War II of
documenting the ways in which social and economic inequalities lead to differential rates
of political participation and differential rates of political success for different segments of
the population. That American democracy did not come close to living up to the ideal of
political equality and universal conscientious citizen participation was a major theme of a
whole series of well-known classics in the first wave of empirical studies of American
political behavior in the 1950s and 1960s.3
In this same period, the political significance of inequality was at the heart of the
elaborate elitist-pluralist debates that dominated American political science for at least
3
See, for example, David B. Truman, The Governmental Process: Political Interests and Public
Opinion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1951; Angus Campbell et al, The American Voter.
New York: Wiley, 1960; and Robert Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1956.
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two decades. Floyd Hunter's early study of Atlanta claimed to have found political power
resting in the hands of unelected economic elites (Hunter 1953), and C. Wright Mills
famously made equally dramatic claims about the existence of a narrow power elite
controlling national politics (Mills 1956). These seminal works provoked a vigorous
response from the so-called "pluralists," culminating especially in the work of Robert
Dahl, who constructed a defense of the quality of American democracy in Who
Governs?, his study of the power structure of New Haven (Dahl 1961), and in his widely
used textbook on American national politics, Pluralist Democracy in the United States:
Conflict and Consent (Dahl 1969). While conceding important differentials in political
power across the class structure of American society, the pluralists suggested that the
existence of multiple competing organized groups representing a wide variety of mass
and elite interests had the effect of widely dispersing political power and giving all
segments of the population at least the opportunity to mobilize and organize, and this
was seen to be at least a rough approximation of the ideal of political equality.
Early on, E. E. Schattschneider did much to puncture this pluralist complacency
about inequality in his famous ironic aphorism: "The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that
the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent. . . The system is skewed,
loaded, and unbalanced in favor of a fraction of a minority" (Schattschneider 1960, 3435). Dahl himself in later work (notably in Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy in 1982)
came to see economic inequality and private economic power as such a major problem
for contemporary democracy that he suggested giving serious consideration to a fairly
radical program of corrective remedies for inequality, including measures to create
substantial forms of political control over private corporations and a democratization of
their internal organization. Still later he came to question how democratic even the
American Constitution really is (Dahl 2002).
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This shift in the pluralist position was so striking already by the early 1980s that
one review of this literature published in the American Political Science Review found it
necessary to distinguish between "Pluralism I" and "Pluralism II" and cites as a typical
expression of Pluralism II a claim by Dahl that the effects of economic inequality are so
severe that the "distribution of advantages and disadvantages is often arbitrary,
capricious, unmerited, and unjust, and in virtually all advanced countries no longer
tolerable" (quoted in Manley 1983, 376). In the almost three decades since then, detailed
analyses of the class biases of every corner of American political life have become a
commonplace in many political science textbooks. The title of one political economy
textbook published in the early 1990s gives a good sense of the thrust of many others-Empty Dreams, Empty Pockets: Class and Bias in American Politics (Harrigan 1994).
The sophisticated political scientists who have produced the recent work on the
damaging effects of inequality on American democracy are presumably well aware of
this history. Perhaps the reason they have largely chosen to ignore it is that
acknowledging the extensive and permanent impact of economic inequality on the level
of political equality in capitalist democracies makes it much more difficult analytically to
decide whether new forms and degrees of inequality really threaten the normal
functioning of American democracy or even whether they represent anything at all that is
particularly new. It is relatively easy to point to increasing inequality and then
demonstrate that there are political effects of this inequality that undermine complete
political equality. However, if this is an inherent feature of all "actually existing
democracies" in capitalist societies, it is a much more difficult analytical task to decide
whether there is a qualitative difference of degree in the impact of new forms of
inequality or whether these new effects fundamentally change the way these
democracies function.
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Without a more realistic portrait of what is really of value and what is really
"democratic" about actually functioning constitutional democracies that are embedded in
capitalist societies, it is hard to see how these important issues can be addressed with
any precision. That sort of realistic portrait needs in turn to be embedded in modern
democratic theory, which provides a much more nuanced understanding of just what is
and is not democratic about "actually existing democracies" and, at the same time, a
nuanced understanding of just what it is that non-elite citizens value and ought to value
in them. It is the purpose of the next section to sketch out two interrelated frameworks
for understanding modern democracies that will in turn provide a basis for suggesting a
better analytic framework for studying the real impacts and the real threats of growing
economic equality for contemporary democracies.
The dual character of actually existing democracies. Modern quantum
physics has become more or less comfortable with the paradox that the phenomenon of
light can be understood as simultaneously displaying the characteristics of either a
stream of particles or a wave, depending upon the viewpoint of the observer within a
particular experimental situation. In a similar but perhaps less paradoxical way, this
article would like to suggest that democratic political institutions in capitalist societies
also can be viewed as manifesting two contradictory sets of characteristics, depending
upon the analytic lens adopted by the observer. Both are important for a full
understanding of how democracy in a capitalist society functions and what threats to this
functioning are posed by certain degrees and forms of economic inequality. These two
ways of conceptualizing "actually existing democracies" will be labeled the neo-Marxist
and neo-Lockean approaches. Neo-Marxist perspectives may be especially fruitful for
macro-level analysis of fundamental structures of political economy such as is often
found in the "varieties of capitalism" literature. Neo-Lockean approaches may be more
13
fruitful for more micro-level analysis of routine or "normal" politics within any given
macro-structure of a particular variety of capitalism.
The neo-Marxist framework starts with an understanding of society as being
constituted by a set of social classes embedded within the highly structured social
formation of modern capitalism. This perspective assumes from the beginning that the
political order of such a society is systematically biased in a way that is intended to
assure the reproduction and successful development of that social formation, which
differentially benefits different classes within society. The critical role of the state, then, is
to formulate strategies, policies, and new institutional forms designed to advance the
long-term interests of the dominant class taken as a whole (as opposed to the
particularistic interests of individual capitalists or sectors). From this point of view, the
interests of members of non-capitalist classes are strictly secondary or irrelevant except
insofar as accomodating non-capitalist interests is necessary to provide political
legitimacy for the capitalist-dominated state.
The neo-Lockean framework, on the other hand, conceptualizes society as a
collection of more or less independent individuals (rather than social classes) who, in a
private, individualized sector pursue their individual agendas but also construct assorted
voluntary associations, including capitalist enterprises (among many other forms of
association). This perspective understands political institutions as instruments for
protecting the rights of individuals in their interactions with each other and as a vehicle
for occasional majorities of individuals within the community to use the state to provide
public goods that cannot be produced at the level of individuals. The ideal state within
this framework is neutral among competing conceptions of the public good, and
individuals enjoy political equality in the processes that lead to the formation of majorities
authorized to use the state to carry out public policy.
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Both of these understandings of the state, despite their apparent contradictions
with each other, will be taken as capturing essential realities of the ways in which
democratic political institutions in capitalist societies function. Each needs some further
elaboration and specification.
The neo-Marxist framework grew out of the classic Marxist view of the state and
"bourgeois" democracy in capitalist societies as summed up in the dismissive
formulation of the Communist Manifesto: "The executive of the modern State is but a
committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." As the quote
from Lenin at the top of this article indicates, the dogmatic orthodox interpretation of this
"sacred" text of the Marxist canon views finds beneath, behind or within the entire
complex of civic associations, political parties, popular elections, checks and balances,
bills of rights, "independent" judiciaries, etc., a whole series of institutional mechanisms
that systematically eviscerate the effects of non-capitalist political activity and guarantee
the complete domination of the State by the bourgeoisie.
Beginning in the late 1960s, however, Western neo-Marxists, operating outside
the rigidly enforced orthodoxy of the communist countries, found this narrow formulation
inadequate to capture the rich and complex kaleidoscope of politics in Western capitalist
democracies, including the myriad ways in which non-capitalist political actors are
sometimes able to capture the state for popular purposes. The most fruitful concept to
come out of this neo-Marxism was the concept of the "relative autonomy" of the state.
One important neo-Marxist theorist, Claus Offe, suggested that the state, in order
to best serve capitalist interests, had to produce both "legitimation" and "accumulation."
The latter was perhaps consistent with direct capitalist control of the state, but
"legitimation" required that the citizenry as a whole had enough influence over the
activities of the state to give some real substance to the "fiction" (to use Morgan's term)
that the political order was genuinely democratic. In this way, a somewhat independent
15
state could serve the "collective capitalist" interest "even in the face of empirical
opposition on the part of isolated capitalists and their political representatives" and also
accomodate a modicum of genuine democratic participation by non-capitalist actors
(Offe 1974, 38-39).
The French neo-Marxist, Nicos Poulantzas, coined the term "relative autonomy of
the state" to sum up this complex understanding of the democratic state in capitalist
society. In Poulantzas's formulation, this represented an even further departure from
classic Marxist orthodoxy as he suggested that direct capitalist control of the state is not
necessary or even maybe desirable from the point of view of the general interests of the
capitalist class:
. . .[T]he participation, whether direct or indirect, of this class in government in no
way changes things. Indeed in the case of the capitalist State, one can go
further: it can be said that the capitalist State best serves the interests of the
capitalist class only when the members of this class do not participate directly in
the State apparatus, that is to say when the ruling class is not the politically
governing class (Poulantzas 1969, 74).
As in Offe, this "relative autonomy" served the double purpose of giving the
general public enough substantive influence in the state to reinforce the illusion of a
genuine democracy while also giving the state sufficient independence from the
particularistic claims of individual capitalists or groups of capitalists to be able to develop
and carry through policies and reforms that served the long-run interests of the capitalist
class as a whole.
As this neo-Marxist school of theorizing developed, it became more and more
clear that the degree of autonomy of the state described by these theorists was
incompatible with the insistence that the state was nevertheless somehow automatically,
almost magically, always perfectly aligned with the long-run interests of the capitalist
class as a whole. The concept of "relative autonomy," instead of rescuing the Marxist
16
perspective, had the effect of undermining its dogmatic determinism (for a full discussion
of these debates and this overall outcome, see Jessup 1982 and 1990).
In an earlier study, the current author built on Poulantzas's notion of the "relative
autonomy" of the state while rejecting Poulantzas's notion that the state in capitalist
society would automatically settle into this particular relationship to the dominant class.
Instead, the autonomy of the state was seen as a variable, elaborating on a suggestion
in the work of Theda Skocpol (in Evans et al 1985, 14). More specifically, the
relationship between the dominant but always factionalized capitalist class and the
democratic state might display any one of five possible levels of state autonomy. These
were labeled instrumental, relative, strategic, structural, and revolutionary, with
instrumental autonomy being the most minimal level of state autonomy and revolutionary
autonomy representing the highest possible level (for a more detailed discussion of
these five levels of autonomy, see Seward 1994). While accepting the possibility that a
state might function at a level of "relative autonomy" of the sort Poulantzas postulated as
ideal for the capitalist class, this formulation also suggested that the autonomy of the
state could be either less than or greater than that, depending on the concrete outcome
of political struggles among capitalist and non-capitalist actors.
Instrumental autonomy refers to a situation in which particular capitalist
individuals or groups are able to capture in a more or less direct way specific organs of
the state to reflect their quite specific interests (for example, a tariff or subsidy or tax
break or a set of regulations benefitting a particular group of capitalists at the expense,
not only of non-capitalist groups, but also of other capitalist sectors). In this sort of direct
capture of particular pieces of the state by particular capitalist interests (more or less
what is meant by the term plutocracy), the state would become altogether incapable of
formulating, let alone implementing, a global strategy that serves the "common good" of
17
the national capitalist system and thus would become actually counterproductive for the
system's long-run survival and success.
If instrumental autonomy is conceived as a level of state autonomy below the
level of the "ideal" of relative autonomy, three different levels of autonomy above relative
autonomy can also be distinguished. Strategic autonomy refers to independent actions
by the state that reflect state objectives either irrelevant to or contrary to the long-run
interests of dominant groups without going so far as to challenge the basic structure of
accumulation and domination. Structural autonomy not only challenges the clear policy
preferences of dominant classes but also embarks on structural challenges to the
existing pattern of accumulation and domination in pursuit of independent purposes. In
its most radical form, this might even entail an architectonic project of constructing an
altogether new variety of capitalism that was in conflict with the clear interests of the
existing capitalist class. Finally, revolutionary autonomy refers to independent actions by
a state to overthrow the entire capitalist order and create an alternative structure
(communist revolutions that dismantle capitalism, for example).
While this framework that treats the autonomy of the state as a variable retains
some of the key elements of the Marxist understanding of political economy (especially
the emphasis on pervasive class biases permeating state action), it is very distinctly nonMarxist in its rejection of the idea of any necessary or automatic subordination of the
state to capitalist interests either in an immediate sense or in the long run. The degree of
congruence between capitalist interests and the actions of the state is instead conceived
of as a highly contested matter, around which great political struggles between capitalist
and non-capitalist political actors may often occur. The outcome of such contestation
cannot be known a priori.
The relevance of this framework for analyzing the effects of specific degrees and
forms of inequality and the effects of particular mechanisms for converting economic
18
power into political power should be obvious. Whatever level of autonomy from dominant
classes the state may display in a constitutional democracy is constructed politically. The
degree, form, and conversion mechanisms of economic inequality may have a direct
effect on what level of autonomy the state exercises with respect to the capitalist class
and what independent purposes the state chooses to pursue with the level of autonomy
it attains. That autonomy and those purposes may reflect the political influence of noncapitalist classes or reflect an independent agenda of political actors located within the
state apparatus itself or, alternatively, reflect the narrow, particularistic interests of
fractions of the capitalist class. Whatever the outcome of these political struggles, they
would be viewed as taking place in a context of a systematic and very substantial class
bias operating throughout the political order in favor of the dominant class, and the
notion of a close approximation to the ideal of political equality would be a distant, even
utopian dream.
Political theorists working solely within the ambit of a neo-Marxist framework
(including those working from an anarchist or libertarian socialist perspective) tend to
view the problem of economic inequality within capitalist societies as having fatal effects
on the prospects for a genuinely democratic political order, defined strictly in terms of a
very high degree of political equality. A large literature exists that suggests ways to
structure alternatives to capitalism that would include highly participatory forms of
democracy while avoiding communist authoritarianism (for excellent examples, see
Bowles and Gintis 1987 and 1998 and Hahnel 2005). These carefully thought out
sketches of non-capitalist utopias and suggested strategies for achieving them are
provocative blueprints and roadmaps for an alternative future. However, for more
pragmatic reformers who support, or are at least resigned to, the capitalist context of
modern constitutional democracies, these radical defenses of political equality are not
very useful. The problem, from this perspective, is not to design the shape of a post-
19
capitalist revolutionary society but rather how to maximize democratic features of politics
within the constraints that a particular variety of capitalism, for better or worse, imposes.
A neo-Lockean analytical lens focuses precisely on those valuable elements of
existing democracies capable of challenging or overcoming the class biases highlighted
by the neo-Marxist view. A neo-Lockean lens can also generate fruitful ways of
formulating questions about the specific ways economic inequality may adversely affect
those valuable democratic elements.
The basic outline of the neo-Lockean perspective is simpler than the neo-Marxist
perspective and was sketched earlier in this section. It emphasizes a view of a society
composed of individuals rather than social classes, the pursuit of individual purposes
and formation of voluntary associations within the private sector, a neutral state to
protect rights and serve as a vehicle for the production of public goods favored by a
majority of citizens, and a high degree of political equality in the political sphere, which is
conceived as largely independent of the private sphere of voluntary social and economic
activity. Within this framework, a leakage of economic forms of power into the political
deliberations of the democratic community can only be viewed as pathological.
A less idealized version of the neo-Lockean framework is embodied in the
pluralist perspective discussed earlier. In a large society, millions of individual citizens
cannot possibly participate directly and effectively in collective decision-making except
via the mechanism of organized groups. Inevitably, however, some groups are more
influential, more powerful than others. It is also inevitable that the citizenry will have to
rely on elected representatives, and these elected representatives may be responsive to
organized groups and their differential power as well as to the body of their constituents
taken as a whole. Executive bureaucracies may be delegated broad areas of public
policy where neither the citizenry nor their elected representatives have time or interest
to make decisions. Moreover, not every citizen will care equally about every issue. Some
20
may be largely indifferent to politics in general. Only issues of great salience to large
segments of the community are likely to be subjected to anything even remotely
resembling a community-wide decision process that has substantial democratic features.
As a result, a wide array of opportunities for private power to insinuate itself into public
politics emerge. Rising levels of economic inequality have the potential to exacerbate
these tendencies until little substantial democratic practice remains.
The elitist-pluralist debates of the 1960s and 1970s, especially on the pluralist
side, took place largely within a neo-Lockean framework for understanding political life.
As that debate and the extensive research into American political realities that flowed out
of it went on, the gap between the reality of modern constitutional democracies in
capitalist societies and the neo-Lockean ideal loomed larger and larger. At the same
time, both pluralists and most of their critics were still convinced that something vital and
essential was at stake in defending these imperfect democracies. A whole tradition of
modern democratic theory developed to try to specify what the essential features of
"actually existing democracy" really are and why they are of value to us even given the
substantial class biases that permeate modern capitalist democracies.
Once again, Robert Dahl was in the forefront of this effort. In a series of works
beginning in the mid-1950s, he distinguished between the democratic ideal, which
postulated full popular sovereignty and a high degree of political equality, and the more
mundane realities of the actually existing systems that political scientists generally
referred to as "democracies." Dahl coined the term "polyarchy" to distinguish this
minimalist conception of democracy from the democratic ideal (Dahl 1972) and over time
refined a now classic list of seven criteria for identifying such systems (Dahl 1989):
1) control of policy by elected officials,
2) officials chosen and removed in frequent and fair elections,
3) near universal adult suffrage,
21
4) the right of most adults to run for office,
5) freedom of expression and right to criticize government,
6) access to alternate sources of information, and
7) the right to form political parties and other forms of political association.
Notably absent from this list is any insistence on anything close to full "political
equality." The emphasis is on conditions necessary to provide opportunity for political
power for all but no insistence on the actual exercise of political power by all. Just as
important, the emphasis is on every adult having some political power, not equal political
power. Citizens need to have access to multiple sources of information but not to perfect
information or equal information. It must be possible to remove public officials from office
through frequent and fair elections, but there is no claim that officials can thereby be
made perfectly accountable to the will of the voters or equally accountable to all. All
adults must be free to form a variety of political associations, but there is no requirement
that the associations formed will be of equal strength or that all segments of the
population will actually even participate in any of them.
This rather undemanding and uninspiring list is a far cry from Lincoln's famous
formula "government of the people, by the people, and for the people," and yet it is a list
of political rights and opportunities that only a minority of contemporary political systems
possess. Added together, even in the presence of systematic class bias throughout a
political order, they constitute a set of realities that guarantee that all citizens have some
recourse against tyranny, some opportunity to have an influence on public policies that
are especially salient to broad segments of the electorate, some chance to create
policies and institutions that increase the political resources available to non-elite
citizens, some ability to resist the political agenda of dominant elites or classes, some
opportunity to organize themselves to fight for greater social justice.
22
More recently, several leading democratic theorists have echoed Dahl's
emphasis on identifying what actually existing democracy is really good for rather than
insisting on holding it to an ideal standard that no political order can live up to. For
example, Adam Przeworski opens a recent reflection on democracy by commenting,
"We tend to confuse the ideals of founders for a description of really existing institutions"
(Przeworski 2010, 1). Instead actually existing democracy is "but a framework within
which somewhat equal, somewhat effective, and somewhat free people can struggle
peacefully to improve the world according to their different visions, values, and interests"
(Przeworski 2010, 16).
Another recent survey by Ian Shapiro also defines the capacities of democracy in
fairly modest terms, suggesting that perhaps the "central task for democracy is to enable
people to manage power so as to minimize domination . . . resulting from the illegitimate
exercise of power" (Shapiro 2003, 3-4). Like Dahl and Przeworski, Shapiro also strips his
conception of the virtues of democracy of almost all of the lofty ideals of perfect "political
equality" or "sovereignty of the people":
Rather than think of democracy as a mechanism for institutionalizing the general
will, we should recognize its claim to our allegiance as the best available system
for managing power relations among people who disagree about the nature of
the common good, among many other things, but who nonetheless are bound to
live together (Shapiro 2003, 146).
Both the neo-Marxist and neo-Lockean lenses for understanding actually existing
democracies embedded in modern capitalist societies can offer insights, concepts, and
categories that can contribute to a more subtle and precise analysis of the effects of
rising economic inequality on the health of actually existing democracies. In the next
section, an analytical framework will be suggested to facilitate that task.
A new analytical framework for actually existing democracies. There are two
parts to the new analytical framework suggested for investigating the most important
23
effects of inequality on actually existing democracies. The first part makes use of the
neo-Marxist and neo-Lockean lenses discussed in the previous section to suggest
specific aspects of contemporary democracy that might be affected substantially by
growing economic inequality. This would allow analysts to pursue much more complex
analyses of rising inequality than the exclusive focus on "political equality" permits. The
second part suggests a set of categories and related questions for breaking down the
problem of economic inequality itself into more specific components, each of which
might form a basis for rather different sorts of research agendas.
Part I. A different set of questions. The neo-Marxist framework elaborated in
the previous section puts emphasis on state autonomy as a variable with five different
possible levels of autonomy: instrumental, relative, strategic, structural, and
revolutionary. How, if at all, does growing inequality affect the likelihood that a
democratic state embedded in capitalist society will settle into one or another of these
levels of state autonomy? Three more specific sets of questions in particular flow from
this framework:
1) Does the particular form that increased inequality has assumed strengthen the
political cohesion of the capitalist class as a whole or has it instead promoted competing
power centers each using its economic power to pursue a particularistic agenda? If the
effect of rising inequality is less class cohesion, this may represent a shift in the direction
of plutocracy in which individual sectors of capitalism simply capture fragmented pieces
of the state for their own particularistic purposes or, in the terms of the neo-Marxist
framework, a shift from the relative autonomy of the state to a merely instrumental
autonomy. Is this shift even so great that it threatens the stability, legitimacy, or longterm success of the system as a whole?
2) Have state actors themselves or non-capitalist political forces that have
acquired substantial control of the state created a situation of strategic or structural
24
autonomy? Is the state frequently ignoring or challenging the agendas of the society's
capitalist class and pursuing political projects of its own that are strongly opposed by the
capitalist class? If so, does a growing inequality allow important sectors of the capitalist
class to fuel a political counter-offensive capable of dismantling those exceptional forms
of state autonomy? Or do these new levels of capitalist economic power give them the
political clout to disrupt and defeat even incipient movements attempting to create forms
of state autonomy that would challenge basic capitalist values or institutions?
3) Are new forms of inequality creating whole new sectors of a national capitalist
class (the technological pioneers of Silicon Valley, for example) or shifting the balance of
power between previously existing sectors (the growing economic power of financial
institutions in recent years, for example)? Does this create a shift in leadership for the
capitalist class as a whole even without a shift from one level of state autonomy to
another? Does that mean a shift in the capitalist agenda but without any rift in the
cohesion of the class as a whole? Or does this new economic power in the hands of a
new sector of national capital mean a fracturing of the cohesion of the capitalist class as
a whole and lead to a shift downward to mere instrumental autonomy? Or, alternatively
does such a rift create an opportunity for non-capitalist groups to forge alliances with the
emerging new sectors of capital and create new and higher forms of state autonomy with
the intent of redesigning the capitalist system to the detriment of old capitalist groups
and the benefit of new ones?
Different questions flow out of the neo-Lockean framework with its focus on the
virtues of actually existing democracy coupled while recognizing the many imperfections
that it displays. Here, too, however, none of these questions require or even necessarily
refer to the ideal of complete political equality. Just as an illustration of one possible neoLockean approach, Dahl's seven classic criteria for identifying polyarchies can serve as
a basis for a set of questions (see page 19 above for Dahl's list):
25
1) Control of policy by elected officials. Has increased inequality so increased
the influence of money in public policymaking that, at least for a few (or most or all)
policy areas, elected officials do not in any meaningful way control policy in response to
elections and public opinion but have become essentially agents of some set of rich
individuals or large associations of rich interests? Has this loss of control by elected
officials even extended to policy areas that are highly salient to the public at large and
vigorously contested during election campaigns? Put another way, are elections failing
to matter even with respect to the most visible public issues around which electoral
contests are fought?
2) Officials chosen and removed in frequent and fair elections. Has growing
inequality so strengthened the political power of the rich through the influence of money
in elections that the ideological range of political candidates has shrunk to a very narrow
spectrum that effectively excludes candidates who raise any serious challenges to the
interests of the wealthy? Or, to put it less radically, has the effect of money demonstrably
narrowed the spectrum of candidates to a much more limited range than used to be the
norm? If so, are elections declining as a mechanism for the public to exercise influence
and to choose representatives who might challenge the interests of the rich?
3) Near universal adult suffrage. Has growing economic inequality allowed for
the financing of political initiatives to challenge whole categories of voters in a way that
effectively deprives not just individuals but whole groups of citizens of the right to vote?
Is effective suffrage ceasing to be a truly universal right of all adults?
4) The right of most adults to run for office. Similarly to the second set of
questions, has the power of rich contributors become so great in the process of
nominating candidates that effectively only citizens who can pass electoral litmus tests
imposed by those contributors have any real possibility of offering themselves for public
office? Are large groups of citizens whose qualifications for public office would once
26
have made them viable candidates now unable to run effective campaigns for lack of the
resources that only a rich elite control?
5) Freedom of expression and right to criticize government. Is the increasing
monopolization of mass media by a few increasingly wealthy individuals or groups and
the increasing importance of mass media in public debate systematically reducing the
effective ability to criticize public officials for most ordinary citizens? Or, alternatively, are
new forms of media, including the Internet and emerging social media, more than
offsetting the growing concentration of ownership of traditional media so that increasing
inequality of wealth in this area is having little or no effect in reducing the ability of
ordinary citizens to mount effective campaigns of criticism of public officials?
6) Access to alternate sources of information. Is increasing inequality of
wealth producing a more homogenous media environment controlled by wealthy
individuals or corporations that are systematically reducing citizen access to competing
sources of information? Or, here again, are new forms of media more than offsetting the
effects of old media concentration and actually increasing the variety of sources of
information available to ordinary citizens? Are there ways that increasingly concentrated
wealth threatens to capture new media as well and limit their ability to generate such a
variety of perspectives?
7) The right to form political parties and other political associations. Is
increasing inequality having a deleterious effect on the right to form politically relevant
associations? For example, is increasing inequality enabling well-financed campaigns to
emasculate the union movement in both the public and private sectors? Is the cost of
sustaining an effective interest group so inflated by the channeling of economic
resources into the treasuries of a small set of associations representing the wealthy that
other associations are reduced to relative impotence? Is the ideological range of
effective lobbying groups in Washington and in state capitals shrinking because only
27
groups representing the interests of the rich can afford the rising costs of lobbying? Or,
once again, are new media so facilitating the rapid mobilization of organizations and
social movements of all types that the importance of money is actually declining even as
wealth is increasingly concentrated?
Both the first set of questions generated from a neo-Marxist perspective and this
second set of questions generated from a neo-Lockean one avoid the pitfalls of treating
every example of less than full political equality as an anomalous pathology that is
attributed to the pernicious effect of an equally anomalous upsurge in economic
inequality. Instead they start from a realistic description of the characteristics of
inherently imperfect democracies and try to assess whether specific changes flowing
from growing inequality have made those democracies even more imperfect. They take
as a given that real democracies always diverge from the ideal of political equality, that
the normal state of democracies in capitalist societies entails a substantial amount of
systematic class bias (in the neo-Marxist framework) or an inevitable pattern of
substantially differential access to political resources for different segments of the
population (in the neo-Lockean framework).
The analytical focus, then, becomes to assess changes in concrete relationships
rather than merely pointing to a failure to live up to an essentially unrealizable ideal. This
also makes it feasible to arrive, at least in principle, at the sometimes sensible result
that, despite the fact that one can observe striking levels of class bias or political
inequality in a particular area of democratic life, this political inequality is no greater than
it was previously. In other words, it becomes at least hypothetically possible to conclude
that rising economic inequality in a particular instance has not had any major effect on
the political system. That is almost impossible to do if any documented instance of
political inequality is assumed to be a new and anomalous departure from an imagined
previous state in which full political equality was implicitly assumed to be the norm.
28
Part II. Disaggregating the concept of inequality. The second part of the
analytical framework attempts to take a more complex view of economic inequality as an
independent variable that generates unhealthy effects in the political order. It is too
simple just to talk about the level of "economic inequality" in general as if all that matters
is whether concentration of wealth or income is increasing or not as measured by the
Gini coefficient. It may be equally significant what form inequality takes, what
mechanisms for transforming economic resources into political power exist, what social
and political barriers to transforming economic resources into political power exist, and
finally what compensatory institutions and practices might offset the tendency of
economic power to undermine the health of actually existing democracies. Each of these
aspects of the "landscape" of economic inequality can suggest fruitful opportunities for
research into the relationship between economic inequality and actually existing
democracies as well as different possibilities for a reform agenda that might inhibit
further distortions of our already imperfect democracies.
Level of inequality. The absolute level of economic inequality in a particular
society or the rate of change to an even higher level of inequality may not be the most
important aspect of the relationship between economic inequality and the political
system. Still, changing levels of inequality may be important in and of themselves. A
recent claim by Jeffrey Winters and Benjamin Page that an oligarchy of the rich exists in
the United States relies almost entirely on an analysis of overall economic inequality.
Their article includes a useful discussion of why inequality of wealth may be more
significant than inequality of income and also takes a stab at analyzing "mechanisms" for
translating econmic power into political power (Winters and Page, 2009). Any such
transformational mechanisms that exist in a society may be multiplied in their effects
simply by the rich having more discretionary wealth and income to feed those
mechanisms. The level of general inequality and changes in that level may also have an
29
important effect on the ability of a society to maintain a sense of itself as a single people
and an integrated community engaged in common projects. At an extreme, especially if
economic inequalities are reinforced by differences of race, ethnicity, language, region,
or religion, a society may find itself divided into two camps that do not really accept the
legitimacy of the other camp controlling the levers of political authority, heightening the
possibility of political paralysis, social violence, civil war, or extraconstitutional seizure of
power (see, for example, the history of many Latin American countries in the 19th and
much of the 20th century).
Forms of inequality. The forms economic inequality takes, however, may be as
important as or more important than the levels of inequality. An aristocracy of large
landholders, for example, may exercise through its economic power in the countryside a
multifaceted hegemony over rural voters that effectively eviscerates their political
independence. That form of wealth may be radically more problematic for democracy
than a growing body of wealthy sports and entertainment celebrities who, even if they
are as rich as the landed aristocracy, have no equivalent ability to use their wealth to
dominate the political life of whole segments of the society. More relevant to modern
democracies in capitalist society, the growing income and wealth disparities between
rich individuals and poor or middle class individuals may have fewer problematic political
impacts than the growing economic power of large corporations, especially multinational
corporations whose vulnerability to the acts of national governments may be much more
limited than purely national corporations experienced in the past. Essential to any full
understanding of the political impact of growing inequality is a careful analysis of each of
the various forms of growing economic power and their often quite different capacities
and even inclinations to transform their economic resources into political power.
Mechanisms for transforming economic resources into political power. The
mechanisms that enable holders of economic resources to bring those resources to bear
30
on the political world may vary widely from one society to another or one time period to
another. The direct bribery of state and national legislators that was so common in the
Gilded Age of robber barons may not play an important role in modern Western
democracies. The role of campaign contributions, on the other hand, has grown
exponentially in the United States (but perhaps not as much elsewhere) as the cost of
modern campaigns in the United States has skyrocketed. The Citizens United decision
may have had the effect of making the mechanism of campaign contributions a much
more powerful instrument for the insertion of corporate (as opposed to individual)
economic resources into our national political life than it was previously. The degree of
control of new and old media may be a quite important mechanism for applying
economic power to politics, but that mechanism will operate very differently in a country
such as the United States where virtually all media is privately owned and a country
such as the United Kingdom where the multiple radio and television channels operated
by the publicly-owned BBC are dominant. Presidential political systems with weak
political parties may be much more vulnerable to legislative lobbying of individual
legislators by powerful economic interests than parliamentary systems with strong and
disciplined political parties. A society with few effective mechanisms for transforming
economic resources into political power may be able to sustain a much healthier
democracy with a much higher level of inequality than another country where a plethora
of effective mechanisms of this sort exist.
Barriers to transforming economic resources into political power. Barriers
to transforming economic power into political power are in some sense the flip side of
the mechanisms to do so. These may range from cultural mores that inhibit the
economically powerful from using their wealth to buy political power ("It just isn't done")
to a pattern of high political offices being predominantly occupied by public-spirited,
independently wealthy aristocrats or gentlemen and gentlewomen whose wealth makes
31
them relatively immune to any sort of financial incentives or pressures from rich nonofficials. Intentional public policy may also erect specific institutions and policies
designed to make the boundary between economic power and political power less
permeable. For example, a polity might create a system of public funding of political
campaigns or an especially vigorous enforcement agency policing inappropriate gifts to
officials or a strictly enforced rule that prevents personnel from regulated industries from
serving in agencies that regulate them and prevents regulatory personnel from taking
jobs in regulated industries after their public service. The variety of barriers that may
occur more or less spontaneously along with those that may be constructed quite
intentionally is potentially as diverse as are the mechanisms for surmounting those
barriers.
Compensatory institutions and practices. Closely related to these barriers are
compensatory institutions and practices. These are institutions and practices that do not
block holders of economic resources from applying them to political purposes but rather
attempt to beef up the political resources of those who are short of personal or corporate
economic resources. Laws that facilitate the formation of labor unions and facilitate their
ability to collect dues from their members and use them for political action are a good
example. A system of public campaign finance that gave every citizen a voucher of
several hundred dollars that could only be used for campaign contributions would not
eliminate the ability of the rich to deploy their resources for political purposes, but it
might have the effect of "leveling the playing field" somewhat by providing a large
amount of politically relevant economic resources to offset the political activity of the rich.
One analyst has recently suggested compensating for the political power of the rich by
resurrecting an assortment of practices drawn from ancient Greece and Rome, including
"magistrate appointment procedures combining lottery and election, offices or
assemblies excluding the wealthy from eligibility, and political trials enlisting the entire
32
citizenry in prosecutions and appeals" (McCormick 2006, 147, and 2011). Here again,
the list of already existing compensatory institutions and the potential list of ones that
might be created is limited only by the imagination. A survey of the institutions and
practices of this sort already in place, however, seems an important part of a full
investigation of the impact of economic inequality on actually existing democracies.
Conclusion. The list just provided in the previous section of five different aspects
of the "landscape" of economic inequality and their impact on actually existing
democracies suggests a rich and varied set of opportunities for research in this area
both for the United States and for transnational comparative studies. It also suggests a
rich and varied set of opportunities for reform designed to minimize the adverse political
effects of rising inequality. Is it more effective to try to change the levels of inequality
through redistributive policies of some sort? Or should reformers concentrate primarily
on some forms of economic inequality that pose much more serious threats to
democratic practices than other forms? Or is the key an effort to dismantle the main
mechanisms that permit wealth to be converted into political power or to erect barriers
that diminish the impact of those mechanisms? Or is the most promising approach
simply to accept the inevitability that wealth in capitalist societies will always find a way
to insinuate itself deeply into the political process and focus on devising compensatory
policies that empower the non-rich instead of trying to corral the resources of the rich?
Combining this multifaceted approach to inequality with the array of concrete
questions suggested by the neo-Marxist and neo-Lockean frameworks only multiplies
the possible research opportunities as each of the five aspects of inequality can be
investigated in relation to any of that long list of questions to explore both causal and
normative questions. It is obviously impossible to imagine a single researcher tackling all
of these questions and all of these facets of inequality in a single work or a single
lifetime. What this framework means to promote instead is a whole field of investigation
33
that moves research far beyond the mere pointing at example after example of how
class bias or the differential distribution of political resources leaves us falling far short of
the democratic ideal of political equality. Instead it might enable the development of a
more nuanced understanding of the whole range of the effects of economic inequality on
our always imperfect democratic institutions.
The already extensive literature on the impact of growing economic inequality on
democratic life, despite its conceptual limitations, has made many important
contributions to our understanding of these complex relationships. What the analytical
framework outlined here suggests is that, despite the many achievements of this rich
literature, the study of the relationship between economic inequality and actually existing
democracies is still in its infancy.
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