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We aim to bring you surprising and important findings from the world of research. I fear this week’s offering may not manage the “surprising” part but it is important.
In a great new study, Swedish researchers investigated how policy outcomes reflect public attitudes towards those policies. They looked across 30 European countries over 38 years on issues ranging from welfare to immigration, foreign policy to the environment.
The good news from the democracy side of things is that more popular policies are more likely to happen. Phew.
But the authors go on to ask: who specifically is more likely to get what they want? The rich. That’s less good.
The size of the difference isn’t enormous – the average share of households who support policy that happens was 57.1% for rich households and 53.7% among low-income ones (the middle class… is in the middle). But what is staggering is how consistent it is across countries and decades.
We’ve known for a very long time that American politics is sensitive to the preferences of the rich. That’s generally been seen as obvious – a system where having or raising huge amounts of cash is a prerequisite for being competitive electorally is a politics with a price tag, and in a highly unequal country it’s the rich that can pay to play.
But this research is telling us that high-income citizens are more likely to agree with policy changes than low-income citizens in all but two European countries, and that income inequality levels or tightness of financial rules around political campaigning don’t seem to be driving the effect.
In democracy you can’t always get what you want, but being rich gets your chances up. Who knew?