Over the past decade, many studies have documented both an increase in economic inequality in most countries of Western Europe, as well as a pervasive rise in voters’ concern about the unequal distribution of resources and opportunities in society. At the same time, these concerns about inequality do not seem to translate into electoral outcomes. Why is that the case? In this study, we bring together scholarship on inequality perceptions, issue ownership, and issue trade-offs to theorize and study three mechanisms that may account for the failure of this transmission at different steps of the representative chain.
First, the distribution of grievances: in order to matter in terms of representation, inequality concerns need to concentrate within identifiable party constituencies. Second, the attribution of issue competence: voters need to believe that their party is competent in addressing the inequalities they are concerned about. And third, the relative importance attributed to inequality: in order for inequality to causally drive vote choice, voters need to assign enough importance to it to be willing to trade off representation on inequality concerns against other relevant programmatic issues, including other inequalities than income.
We use original survey data from five European countries to assess all three mechanisms on the basis of both observational and survey experimental evidence. Our preliminary findings suggest that the chain of representation mostly fails in the third step: voters do not seem to value economic inequalities enough to reward or punish parties for emphasizing or neglecting these issues.