Income Inequality, Party Misperception and Democracy Satisfaction Wedge

• In Event: Class and Inequality & Legislative Politics & International Security Virtual Poster Session
  In Virtual Poster Session: Class and Inequality Virtual Poster Session

Abstract

This paper studies an important political channel, through which income inequality transforms into dissatisfaction with democracy and distrust in government, using 2019 British Election Study. We first document that households of different wealth have persistent gaps in the degree of satisfaction with democracy and governmental trust, regardless of their gender, education, party affiliation, etc. Low-income earners are more dissatisfied with how democracy works and more distrustful of the government than affluent households. Then we show that income inequality has a causal effect on misperception about political parties, that is, the extent to which households wrongly placed their beliefs of parties' left-right position from reality, measured by the British Election Expert Survey and the Chapel Hill Expert Surveys. Aldrich-McKelvey Scaling method is applied to correct party perceptions of voters and experts into a common scale. Particularly, Households of low income perceive party positions less accurately than households of affluence and therefore, have larger misperception. Finally, we demonstrate the causality from the size of party misperception to dissatisfaction with democracy and distrust in government: observing the actual party positions, low-income households are more disappointed by the bigger discrepancy between their perceived and actual party placements, and become more dissatisfied and distrustful of the democracy and the government.

Authors

• Yen-Chieh Liao, University of Essex

• Tzu-Ping Liu

• Li Tang, University of Essex/Middlesex University London