An emerging body of literature studies inequality in political influence between socioeconomic groups. This work usually finds that poorer citizens appear to exert lower political influence than richer citizens.
Most of these studies have focused on formal, national-level policies, mainly in Western countries. However, in rother world regions crucial distributional outputs from politics operate through personal clientelistic relations with politicians and through the allocation of local public goods to communities that mobilize to exert pressure, in addition to formal channels.
This paper uses existing public opinion and expert surveys to study variation and drivers of perceived political influence in the form of perceptions about how much politicians listen to or respond to citizens’ demands. In a preliminary analysis, we find great variation in inequality of perceived political influence and no clear overall tendency across countries for wealthier citizens to display higher perceived political influence than poorer citizens. This cross-country variation in inequality in perceived political influence will be substantiated across different opinions surveys and other available measures of political inequality.
To explore the extent to which inequality in perceived political influence might be driven by informal distributive politics, we undertake two types of analysis: at the individual level and at the country level. At the individual level, we explore whether protest participation and clientelistic linkages mediate the relation between socioeconomic background and perceived political influence. At the country level, we study whether the extent and type of clientelism and macro-indicators of service delivery protests correlate with inequality of political influence.