Equality of What? Mapping the Changing Equality Concepts of Parties in the OCED

• In Event: Redefining Class Cleavages

Abstract

There is a persistent gulf in scientific knowledge about equality preferences. While voter preferences have been extensively researched, political parties’ conceptions of equality have remained uncharted territory. Hence, if and how parties’ positions respond to voter preferences, drive policy outputs, and determine inequality outcomes could not be addressed. Taking Sen’s “Equality of What?” question as our point of departure, we address this lack of large-N data 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 distinct “Varieties of Egalitarianism” (which vary between countries, parties, and over time). Based on a combination of one million crowd-coded decisions and expert judgments, we have compiled data that allows us to map how parties in OECD countries conceive of equality and how their conceptions have changed since 1970. Conceptually, we distinguish between emphasis on economic equality, equal chances/social mobility, equal rights and antidiscrimination, idiosyncratic conceptions of equality, and mere lip-service (“We are the party of equality”). Our findings help to bring empirical nuance to heated debates about if and how parties changed their views on equality: Have parties indeed de-emphasized economic equality to become “woke”? Where and when, if at all, has the Left traded-off material equality for equal rights? Our new data allows us to map these important changes systematically. On this basis, we argue that distinct “Varieties of Egalitarianism” prevail over concept-convergence across countries and party families.

Authors

• Alexander Horn, University of Konstanz

• Martin Haselmayer, University of Konstanz

• K. Jonathan Klüser, University of Zürich