15:00 - 16:40
P4
Room: South Hall 2B
Panel Session 4
Cyrill Otteni - Female political empowerment and the gender gap in political participation
Martin Haselmayer - Equality Of What? Mapping Changes In The Equality Concepts Of Parties In OCED Countries Since 1970
Andy Harris - A Booth of One's Own: Gender and Turnout in Pakistan
Didac Queralt - Historical origins of gender gaps in political representation: And how cultural entrepreneurs can help close it
Katharina Pfaff - Gender and Political Protest: Understanding Mass Mobilization for Gender Equality
Equality Of What? Mapping Changes In The Equality Concepts Of Parties In OCED Countries Since 1970
P4-02
Presented by: Martin Haselmayer
Alexander Horn 1, Martin Haselmayer 1, K. Jonathan Klüser 2
1 University of Konstanz
2 University of Zurich
There is a persistent gulf in scientific knowledge about (in)equality preferences. While voter preferences have been widely researched, parties’ conceptions of (in)equality have remained uncharted territory. Hence, if and how parties’ positions respond to voter preferences, drive policy outputs, and eventually lead to inequality outcomes could not be addressed. Taking Sen’s “Equality of What?” question as its point of departure, the paper addresses this lack of data and research on parties’ equality preferences. Equality is not something of which parties want more or less, that they favor or oppose. Rather, there are different concepts of equality whose combinations define different Varieties of Egalitarianism within and between countries. Based on a combination of one million crowd-coded decisions and expert judgments, we have compiled a data set that allows us to map how parties in 12 OECD countries conceive of equality and how their conceptions have changed since 1970. Conceptually, we distinguish between emphasis on economic equality, equal chances/mobility, equal rights and antidiscrimination, idiosyncratic conceptions of equality, and mere lip-service (“We are the party of equality”). Our findings speak directly to heated debates about if and how left parties changed their views and have traded off material equality, equal chances and equal rights: in some countries the Left has indeed de-emphasized material equality and become “woke”. Our new data allows us to map these changes. On this basis, we argue that three distinct Varieties of Egalitarianism prevail over concept-convergence across countries and party families.