European colonialism in Africa was brief, lasting less than a century for most of the continent. Nevertheless, scholars have enumerated myriad long-term political effects of this brief period of colonial rule. First, Europeans determined the number, size, and shape of African states through their partition of the continent, with contemporary implications for state viability, strength, and legitimacy. Second, colonial rule influenced the nature of ethnic boundaries and their salience for politics through the use of indirect rule, language and labor policies, and the location of internal administrative boundaries. Third, colonial rule significantly shaped the nature of postcolonial state-society relations by divorcing the state from civil society during the colonial era and by engendering deep mistrust of the state as a benevolent actor. Fourth, many colonial institutions were preserved at independence, including the marriage of state institutions and customary rule, with deleterious effects. Fifth, differential colonial investments across communities and regions generated significant inequality, with continued political implications in the 21st century. The identification of these long-term effects has largely resulted from empirical comparisons across different forms of colonial rule, especially comparing territories administered by different colonial powers. Future research should move beyond this blunt approach, instead pursuing more disaggregated and nuanced measures of both colonial rule and its political legacies, as well as more scholarship on the long-term interaction between colonial and indigenous political institutions.
Article
Frej Klem Thomsen
The conceptualization and moral analysis of discrimination constitutes a burgeoning theoretical field, with a number of open problems and a rapidly developing literature. A central problem is how to define discrimination, both in its most basic direct sense and in the most prominent variations. A plausible definition of the basic sense of the word understands discrimination as disadvantageous differential treatment of two groups that is in some respect caused by the properties that distinguish the groups, but open questions remain on whether discrimination should be restricted to concern only particular groups, as well as on whether it is best conceived as a descriptive or a moralized concept. Furthermore, since this understanding limits direct discrimination to cases of differential treatment, it requires that we be able to draw a clear distinction between equal and differential treatment, a task that is less simple than it may appear, but that is helpful in clarifying indirect discrimination and statistical discrimination. The second major problem in theorizing discrimination is explaining what makes discrimination morally wrong. On this issue, there are four dominant contemporary answers: the valuational and expressive disrespect accounts, which hold that discrimination is wrong when and if the discriminator misestimates or expresses a misestimate of the moral status of the discriminatee; the unfairness account, which holds that discrimination is wrong when and if the discriminator unfairly increases inequality of opportunity; and the harm account, which holds that discrimination is wrong when and if the discriminator harms the discriminatee. Each of these accounts, however, faces important challenges in simultaneously providing a persuasive theoretical account and matching our intuitions about cases of impermissible discrimination.
Article
Oliver Owen
The politics of Nigeria have often been considered a matter of managing social diversity in a political economy whose extremes have been exaggerated by oil money. But this story is incomplete without thinking instead more deeply about inequality, about political party origins and ideologies as well as identities, and about politics beyond parties and elections. Bureaucracy, mass mobilization, and everyday practice are equally important issues in Nigerian politics as the country moves through another economic transformation.
Nigeria’s political structures have been built around questions of managing diversity and allocating resources, and the country’s federal system embeds a tension between how much power is managed from the center and how much is devolved to the constituent states and local governments. As well as parties, legislatures, and executives, security institutions have been prominent in the country’s political formation, and public institutions are both formed around, and are vectors of forming, elite social networks.
Partly due to long-standing models of social legitimacy and partly as a result of the kind of identity politics Nigeria has chosen to manage diversity, models of citizenship based on localized belonging are pervasive drivers of political patterning. Political factions and parties, often characterized as election-winning aggregations of patron-client networks, also however embed distinct historical ideological traditions, which chart Nigeria’s movements between liberal capitalism and state-directed development and which have driven both domestic debates and a continental and regional leadership role.
Tensions around inequalities and the realm of the political more generally cannot be understood as a matter of governmental institutions alone but bring in religion, gender construction, labor movements, the media, civil society, and new social movements, as well as the “ineffable politics” of tactic, techniques, norms, and practices that fix the realm of the political as a key part of everyday social and economic life.
Article
Cristina Bodea and Christian Houle
A coup d’état is an all-around consequential event, and coups remain frequent in sub-Saharan Africa. Historically, ethnic inequality—the measure of income disparities at the level of ethnic groups—has been paid little attention as a potential cause of coups and other types of regime breakdown. More work exists on the relationship between ethnicity broadly construed and coup d’état, and in particular the role of unequal access to the military for different ethnic groups and the role of ethnic exclusion from political power. Our own work presents a theory that links “between” and “within” ethnic group income inequality to coup d’état initiated by ethnic groups. The argument is that high income and wealth inequality between ethnic groups, coupled with within-group homogeneity, increases the salience of ethnicity and solidifies within-group preferences vis-à-vis the preferences of other ethnic groups, increasing the appeal and feasibility of a coup. Empirical findings from sub-Saharan Africa support the main theoretical claim linking ethnic inequality to coup d’état. Additional evidence from sub-Saharan Africa and a larger global sample are consistent with the causal mechanisms. More remains to be researched in this area, however. Directions for future research include looking at the access of ethnic groups to the military, the intervening role of natural resources in the calculus of ethnic groups, and the role of ethnic inequality in incumbent takeovers.
Article
Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille
Educational level is one of the strongest factors in explaining how citizens behave in politics. Political scientists have shown time and again that the higher their level of formal education, the more people are interested in politics, the more they trust politicians, and the more they participate in politics. A strong educational gradient can be observed at almost every form of participation, and in many Western liberal democracies. Far less attention has been given to the political consequences of this gap in participation between the well- and the less-educated.
In the 21st century, educational level has turned out to be a driver behind the rise of new social and political divides in Western democracies. Increasingly, education is studied separately from class or income as a source of political attitudes, political behavior, and social and political inequalities. It is a very relevant factor to understand the contours of the contemporary political landscape in consolidated Western democracies. Traditional cleavages are eroding, and rising levels of education have been creating new social groups and new political inequalities between educational groups.
In many Western democracies, the well-educated have come to dominate democratic institutions. This rise of a political meritocracy has led to policy incongruences in favor of the well-educated and is a source of resentment among the lesser-educated. For example, education has been one of the main explanatory factors in the vote for Brexit, the support for Trump in the United States, and the election of Macron and the rise of the Yellow Vests movement in France.
Article
Marcelo Paixão and Irene Rossetto
Latin America ranks highest in the world in markers of social and economic inequality, as well as in the negative effects of inequality on other realms of social life, such as access to basic services, political power, and, in many countries, unfair treatment by police and the justice system. Yet in Latin America it is not possible to talk about racism, ethnic-racial discrimination, and inequality without taking into consideration the hegemonic narratives of mestizaje and racial democracy that shape the way many Latin American nations think about themselves today. Can a region characterized by extreme levels of social inequality also be ethnically and racially democratic? The pattern of ethnic and racial relations in Latin America is marked by discrimination, but at the same time, it creates mechanisms that prevent individuals from recognizing the existence of discrimination against themselves. This reality carries several complications for census-taking and other forms of statistical data collection intended to measure ethnic-racial inequality. Because the main paradigms of analysis of social inequality prioritize economics and class, they have directly or indirectly strengthened the discourse that in Latin America, there is no racism. Certainly, the future of research on race relations and inequality in Latin America will benefit from new demographic data and public opinion surveys, carried out since the turn of the century, which include the identification of indigenous and Afro-descendant people. This trend may advance the production of studies grounded in more robust empirical evidence of ethnic-racial asymmetry.
Article
Cynthia McClintock
Since Peru’s independence in 1824, politics in the country have been turbulent. Repeatedly, democracy was attempted but not sustained. Between 1919 and 2000, no Peruvian political regime—either democratic or authoritarian—endured more than 12 years. Scholars agree that the primary reason for Peru’s history of political turbulence was the severity of its overlapping ethnic, class, and geographical cleavages. Peru’s renowned novelist Mario Vargas Llosa wrote that the country was “an artificial gathering of men from different languages, customs, and traditions whose only common denominator was having been condemned by history to live together without knowing or loving one another.”
However, in the 21st century, with greater democracy, cleavages attenuated and the possibility of a cohesive nation emerged. With one-person, one-vote elections, political violence has been rare and economic growth rapid. However, Peru’s economic growth has been based heavily on mining and other extractive industries, and it is not clear that cleavages have attenuated sufficiently for democracy to be consolidated. In addition, democracy is challenged by bitter legacies from the 1980s–1990s conflict with the Shining Path guerrillas and the 1990–2000 authoritarian government of Alberto Fujimori. Furthermore, after 2016, it was all too apparent that Peru’s political and economic elites remained complicit in corrupt global financial networks; as criminal investigations began, and as the coronavirus pandemic took a very heavy toll in Peru, political conflict escalated.
Article
Work on the Latin American right mainly assumes it is a political phenomenon, despite recognition that it emerges from, and can be supplanted by, groups of actors from within and across business, in the media, in the intellectual sphere, and indeed in the military. A broader approach is provided here to help integrate these (f)actors, using Michael Mann’s work on social power and Nancy Fraser’s concepts of progressive and reactionary neoliberalism. It is argued that elites from these sectors, espousing neoliberalism, and supported by powerful transnational elites with similar views, dominate the areas of ideology, economics, military, and politics in order to install, maintain, extend, and naturalize neoliberalism in the region. This dominance has been challenged from the left and indeed from the right, resulting in at minimum progressive and reactionary forms of neoliberalism centered on inequalities of recognition. Nevertheless, the range and depth of possible change, particularly in stalling and reversing distributive inequality, may be limited, due to the embeddedness of neoliberalism in national, regional, and transnational governance systems.
Article
Gopal Sreenivasan
Serious inequalities in health abound the world over. For example, there are marked differences in average life expectancy both between and within countries. Individual life expectancy varies by more than 30 years between the highest national average and the lowest. Even worldwide, average life expectancy lags more than 10 years below the highest national average. Within single countries, inequalities in life expectancy between the top and bottom groups of men, for example, have been recorded at 7 years in England and Wales and at almost 15 years in the United States, albeit using rather differently constituted groups.
Intuitively, these inequalities in health will strike many observers as unjust. But why are they unjust, if they are? Are inequalities in health unjust per se? If not, what makes some inequalities in health unjust, but not others?
According to an influential analysis, inequalities in health are unjust when they are avoidable, unnecessary, and unfair. Thus, if an inequality in health is inevitable, it is not unjust. Following this analysis means that answering these questions requires a combination of empirical and normative understanding. On the empirical side, some understanding of the socially controllable causes of health is required. On the normative side, various dimensions of fairness have to be understood. In addition, some appreciation of the interaction between these two sides is needed..
Each side of the question is fairly complicated. With respect to the requirements of fairness, three subsidiary controversies can be distinguished. To begin with, should a general principle of equality be applied directly to the case of health? An alternative approach traces the injustice of avoidable inequalities in health to the independent injustice of their social causes instead. Next, should inequalities be defined across social groups (such as class or race within countries or, indeed, countries themselves)? If so, which groups? An alternative is to define inequalities across individuals. Finally, should equality be defined in comparative terms (as is traditional)? An alternative is to define the requirements of fairness non-comparatively (as a matter of “priority” to the worst off). Even if a given inequality in health is avoidable, some resolution of all three controversies is needed to decide whether that inequality is unfair.
Article
Miki Caul Kittilson
The burgeoning field of gender and political behavior shows that the way in which ordinary citizens connect to the democratic process is gendered. Gender differences in voting behavior and participation rates persist across democracies. At the same time, countries vary substantially in the size of these gender gaps. In contemporary elections, women tend to support leftist parties more than men in many countries. Although men and women vote at similar rates today, women still trail men in important participatory attitudes and activities such as political interest and discussion. Inequalities in political involvement undermine the quality of deliberation, representation, and legitimacy in the democratic process. A confluence of several interrelated factors (resources, economy, socialization, political context) work together to account for these differences. Today, scholars more carefully consider the socially constructed nature of gender and the ways in which it interacts with other identities. Recent research on gender and political behavior suggests that political context affects different kinds of women in different ways, and future research should continue to investigate these important interactions.
Article
Siba Harb
Most philosophers agree that it is unjust for one’s life prospects to be determined by one’s race, gender, or social class. And most think that there are demanding duties on members of the same political community (co-citizens) to reduce inequalities that track these features of individuals. But philosophers strongly disagree about how to evaluate inequalities that track the country one is born in. Are global inequalities (inequalities among individuals living in different countries) as problematic and for the same reasons as domestic inequalities (inequalities among co-citizens)? The question of whether egalitarian principles of distributive justice extend globally, beyond the domestic sphere, has been the central question in the debate on global distributive justice. Statists argue that there is something normatively significant about the state, but not the global institutional order, which grounds one’s concerns with domestic inequalities, but not global inequalities. Global egalitarians argue that global inequalities are as unjust to the same extent and for the same reasons as domestic inequalities. The disagreement between both camps can be traced back to different normative, empirical, and methodological assumptions. Statists and global egalitarians can, however, converge on a number of important issues, and the debate can be advanced beyond the stalemate it has reached by investigating these issues of convergence. Significantly, statists can agree with global egalitarians that global justice requires equality of concern (the requirement that interests of all individuals have equal weight), and global egalitarians have reasons to take states seriously to the extent that having a world of states (or multiple political communities) can be shown to be compatible with the requirement of equal concern. Thus, it is important to work out whether individuals have a fundamental interest in being members of political communities, how that interest compares to their interests in opportunities, income, and wealth, and which institutional arraignments can advance these interests according to the right balance.
Article
Jacqueline M. Klopp and Jeffrey W. Paller
Africa’s growing slums are complex, diverse neighborhoods with their own histories. Currently, these places, characterized by spatially concentrated poverty and human rights abuses, are where large proportions and, in many cases, the majority of Africa’s growing urban populations live. These slums often have a politics characterized by clientelism and repression, but also cooperation, accountability, and political mobilization. Importantly, they must be understood within a wider political context as products of larger historical processes that generate severe inequalities in standards of living, rights, and service provision. Varied approaches (modernization vs. more critical historical and political economy approaches) attempt to explain the emergence, dynamics, and persistence of slums and the politics that often produces, characterizes, and shapes them in Africa. While raising important questions about the link between urbanization and democracy, modernization theories, which are typically ahistorical, do not fully explain the persistence and actual growth of slums in African cities. More historically grounded political economy approaches better explain the formation and dynamics of slums in African cities, including the complex, uneven, and inadequate service delivery to these areas. Whether the conditions of Africa’s slums and the social injustice that undergirds them will give birth to greater democratization in Africa, which, in turn, will deliver radical improvements to the majority, is a critical unanswered question. Will social movements, populist opposition parties, and stronger citizenship claims for the poor ultimately emerge from slum—and wider city—politics? If so, will they address the political problem of inequality that the slum represents? A focus on cities, slums, and their politics is thus a core part of growing concern for the future of African cities and democratic politics on the continent.
Article
Erika Forsberg and Louise Olsson
Prior research has found robust support for a relationship between gender inequality and civil war. These results all point in the same direction; countries that display lower levels of gender equality are more likely to become involved in civil conflict, and violence is likely to be even more severe, than in countries where women have a higher status. But what does gender inequality mean in this area of research? And how does research explain why we see this effect on civil war? Exploring this requires reviewing existing definitions and measurements of gender inequality, a concept that has several dimensions. Several clusters of explanations show how gender inequality could be related to civil war while more equal societies are better able to prevent violent conflict. It is clear that existing misconceptions that gender inequality primarily involves the role of women are clouding the fact that it clearly speaks to much broader societal developments which play central roles in civil war.
Article
Silvia Borzutzky
Since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1989, Chile has seen a remarkable coexistence of democratic institutions and economic inequality, because while there has been a successful transition to democracy over time, the market economic policies imposed by the Pinochet dictatorship have remained the same. These economic policies have resulted in large social and economic inequalities that have profoundly divided Chilean society. There are no indications that these inequalities and these social divisions will be dramatically reduced unless the current market economic policies are changed and policies based on a new pro-equality agenda are implemented.
Article
Timothy Hellwig and Dani M. Marinova
Connections between the economy and vote are commonly invoked to evaluate political accountability in representative democracies. A principal motivation for studying economic voting lies in its value as a gauge of whether democracy works or not. In recent years, however, researchers have cast doubt on the assertion that economic conditions influence voters’ evaluations of political incumbents.
Criticisms hail from several directions. Some, adopting a cross-national perspective, cite the instability problem as evidence against economic voting’s existence. That is, variance in the economy-vote relationship across different national contexts is sufficiently large so as to undermine claims that the economy registers a systematic effect. Other critics charge that the electorate lacks sufficient knowledge to incorporate economic conditions in their decisions at the polls. Still others remind us not to mistake correlation for causation. They charge that the voters’ perceptions of how well the economy is performing are viewed through a pre-existing partisan lens. All told, these and other reservations cast doubt on the use of economic voting as a means to evaluate accountability and, in turn, democratic performance.
These charges against the fidelity of economic voting require further examination. Rather than join a growing chorus of observers concluding that the economic vote is a chimera, this piece posits that recent critiques should push us to reconceive rather than discredit economic voting. Recent work in psychology and behavioral economics provides a basis for constructive and meaningful reinterpretations of the economy’s influence on voter decisions. These new directions include an emphasis on framing effects—be it on the part of strategic elites or from the media, an emphasis on what voters know about the economy, and a wider consideration of just which “economy” matters to which set of voters. While many in number, each of these new directions advance understanding by embodying deeper conceptions of voters and elected officials.
Article
Ashley Jardina and Spencer Piston
A great deal of work in the domain of race and politics has focused on two phenomena: racial prejudice and racial solidarity. Scholarship on racial prejudice has primarily examined the nature and consequences of white racial animus, particularly toward blacks. In the latter half of the 20th century, in the post-Civil Rights era, scholars argued that racial prejudice had been transformed, as most whites rejected the belief that there were innate, biological differences between racial groups. Instead, whites came to embrace the belief that blacks did not subscribe to particular cultural values associated with the protestant work ethic. While these attitudes profoundly shape public opinion and political behavior in the United States, we suspect that there has been a resurgence in the belief that consequential biological differences between racial groups exist, and that biological racism is a growing force in American politics. Most of the development of work on racial consciousness has examined the effects of racial solidarity among racial and ethnic minorities on public opinion. Individuals’ psychological attachments to their racial group are an important element in American politics, and their importance may increase as the country becomes more racially and ethnically diverse.
Article
This article examines the rise of Afro-Latin social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean from the late 1970s to the early 2000s. It seeks to understand what factors explain the rise of black consciousness and black social movements. Theoretically, it explores the multidimensional nature and meaning of blackness as a social constructions and how such constructions may contribute to or limit Afro-based social movements. Contrary to popular perception, Afro-Latin social movements are not new, but form part of the long history of black resistance in the Americas. Although Black social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean are not new and have long histories like those of Maroon, Quilombo, Cimarròn, and Palenque societies, it is argued that the1970s witnessed an uptick in Afro-referenced social movements across the region. These movements, although in no way monolithic, represented a repertoire of various identities, ideas, and philosophies. Their agendas were framed in the context of racial and social justice demanding social, economic, and cultural rights long denied to them. Theoretically, Afro civil society as a specific Black space and cultural site, is theorized to show how many of these movements emerged. Afro civil society therefore is used to place these movements within a theoretical and historical timeframe.
