Description:

Please join the American Politics Workshop as they host Alan M. Jacobs, Professor and Department Head in the Department of Political Science at The University of British Columbia.

 The steep rise in economic inequality across many high-income democracies over the past four decades has spawned a vast interdisciplinary research literature, including a growing body of work on inequality’s effects on politics and public policy. Much existing research focuses on whether rising inequality, through popular demand, drives governments to do more: i.e., to ramp up redistribution in order to mitigate income gaps. In contrast, drawing on a paper with Tim Hicks and J. Scott Matthews, this talk examines how growing inequality may yield mass-political attitudes that push governments to do less. Specifically, we probe the proposition that rising inequality – particularly the growing concentration of resources at the very top of the income scale – erodes public support for taxation to finance policies with widely valued, broadly shared benefits, such as public education, health care, and infrastructure.  We theorize that economic inequality may undercut the willingness of the non-rich to pay for collective goods through three possible pathways: by reducing the perceived fairness of broad-based cost-imposition; by eroding identification with the social collective; and by reducing trust in the political system. We test these claims via a series of online survey experiments conducted with nationally representative U.S. samples. The studies provide substantial evidence that knowledge of (or attention to) rising income inequality reduces willingness to pay for collective goods via the trust and identification mechanisms. Taken together, the findings shed light on the centrifugal force that inequality exerts on social life, leading citizens to distrust and distance themselves from collective endeavors and public institutions – and, in turn, undercutting the mass-political foundations of resource-intensive state action.

Alan M. Jacobs (Ph.D. Harvard, 2004) is Head of Department and a Professor of Political Science specializing in the comparative political economy of advanced industrialized democracies, the politics of public policy, political behavior, and qualitative and mixed methodology. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on the comparative politics of inequality, qualitative research methods, and research design. Jacobs’ first book, Governing for the Long Term: Democracy and the Politics of Investment (Cambridge, 2011, co-winner of the APSA award for the Best Book in Comparative Politics; winner of the APSA award for the Best Book Developing or Applying Qualitative Methods; and winner of the IPSA prize for the Best Book in Comparative Policy and Administration), examined how democratic governments manage long-term policy issues. This book and related articles have sought to understand the conditions under which elected governments are willing to impose short-term costs on their constituents in order to invest in long-term social benefits. Jacobs’ work in this area has sought to identify the distinctive features of the politics of intertemporal choice as compared to the more commonly analyzed politics of redistribution.