Lecture 1: The politics of inequality
POLITICS IS ABOUT ‘WHO GETS WHAT , WHEN AND HOW?’ (H AROLD LASSWELL)
Difference and inequality have historically been key sources of social and political conflict and struggles, often leading to important
political change (think of revolutions!). The course begins by looking into current and historical struggles over diversity and
inequality.
Ethiopia, Chile, France movements
The public debate on social and political inequality in relation to ethnicity, gender, age, income and education has returned
in its intensity
o MeToo movements in relation to the inequality between men and women
o Occupy protests against growing gap between rich and the poor in Western Country
o Netherlands Women quota in large corporations
o Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st century and the concentration of wealth
They take place in either
Formal, local, national, international realm of politics
Or on the streets
WHAT FORMS OF INEQUALITIES SPARK SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONFLICTS, WHEN AND WHY?
Social inequality as subject of research in political science
o Social inequalities lead to political conflict and struggle
Some people have more economic, social or cultural resources than other, and have more opportunities.
Because of these many conflicts of interest arise
o Relationship between social inequality and inequality in terms of politics and power
Some people have more opportunities than others to have their wishes and interests prevail and to turn
collectively binding decisions to their favour
What are the demands in conflicts? Key political issues:
o Contestation and conflict: collective action
o Democracy and representation
o Citizenship
o Political participation and decision-making
WHAT DO WE MEAN BY THE CORE CONCEPTS ‘INEQUALITY’, ‘DIVERSITY ’ AND ‘JUSTICE’ AND WHY ARE THESE IMPORTANT
FOR UNDERSTANDING POLITICS AND POLITICAL CONFLICT ?
Diversity
Descriptor and norm
It is a buzzword
Refers to difference, not necessarily means equality or inequality
o We speak of it to when we want to say that entities are not the same, but rather different
Yet, differentiation which is a functional process in complex societies mostly does lead to inequality
This leads to empirical questions:
o What differences and differentiations lead to unequal distribution of life chances or opportunities?
o How does this function? What mechanisms help to produce or maintain inequalities, what mechanisms challenge
or change this?
o How is society and politics structured, which differences are more salient and contentious?
But also, normative debates:
, o How should diversity be dealt with? Diversity policies?
Happy talk
Diversity policies are very much embraced in big corporations
o “Humanity is plural, not singular. The best way the world works is everybody in. Nobody out.”
o “Embracing diversity fosters empowerment and encourages innovation
In science
Different opinions on ethnic diversity
o Robert Putnam
Robert Putnam (2007): ethnic diversity in the immediate residential settings leads to declining solidarity
and reduced levels of trust.
o Tom van der Meer
Tom van der Meer (2014): heterogeneity is positively related to interethnic contact and (consequently) to
interethnic trust.
Diversity and categorization
Categorization splits sets of actors considered dissimilar
Defines relations and boundaries between the two sets
Generate shared understandings of who we are, who they are, what sets us apart and connects us
That in turn shape social interactions, how we deal with society and what we seek in life
Individual belongs to multiple categories
o Dynamic categorization, some shift, some remain fairy static
Tilly: Durable Inequality
Inequalities mean more versus less, better versus worse, safer versus more unsage, healthier versus more unhealthy, etc.
(Maussen)
Tilly looks at the causes, uses, structures, and effects of categorical inequality, with a focus on the questions:
How, why, and with what consequences do long-lasting, systematic inequalities in life chances distinguish members of
different socially defined categories of persons?
How do categorical inequalities form, change, and disappear?
Inequality
Definition: unequal distribution of goods and resources (material and non-material)
o Relative goods means relational (to someone else)
o Human inequality in general consists of the uneven distribution of attributes among a set of social units such as
individuals, categories, groups, or regions. Social scientists concern themselves especially with the uneven
distribution of costs and benefits—that is, goods, broadly defined.
Inequality is:
o Categorical
o Durable
Elements of inequality:
o Goods vary in the extent to which they are:
Autonomous (observable without reference to outside units, as in accumulations of food)
Wealth, income, and health exemplify autonomous goods
Relative (observable only in relation to other units, as in prestige)
Prestige, power, and clientele exemplify relative goods
o On the whole, inequalities with respect to autonomous goods reach greater extremes than inequalities with
respect to relative goods.
o Autonomous and relative goods depend intimately on each other
, Although people come to value them for their own sakes, relative goods generally occupy a subordinate,
derivative position: they serve as a means of creating or maintaining categorical inequality with respect to
autonomous goods
Possession of prestige, power, clientele, and status-marking goods then justifies the superior position of
favored categories ex post facto
o Categorical inequality with respect to autonomous goods gains strength from and generates parallel differences in
relative goods
Analysis of inequality that focus on the individual and rationalization within neoclassical economic fail to the extent that
essential causal business takes place not inside individual heads but within social relations among persons and sets of
persons
Relational analysis of inequality are better
o And Tilly considers persons to possess as many identities as the number of social relations they maintain, one
identity per relation, and to acquire their individuality through interactions among genetic capabilities and social
experiences.
Why is inequality categorical?
Does not mean that Tilly neglects or dismisses individual difference, but he argues that inequality is patterned along
categorical lines
Tilly’s central argument:
o Large, significant inequalities in advantages among human beings correspond mainly to categorical differences
such as black/white, male/female, citizen/foreigner, or Muslim/Jew rather than to individual differences in
attributes, propensities, or performances
Categories are distinctly bounded pairs, hierarchically ordered:
o “Category” to recognize that class, gender, race, ethnicity, and similar socially organized systems of distinction
clearly qualify
They provide clearer evidence for the operation of durable inequality
Even where they employ ostensibly biological markers, such categories always depend on extensive social
organization, belief, and enforcement.
o Thus relational: defined and ordered in relation to each other (black/white, Muslim/Christian, disabled/able-
bodied, women/men, aristocrat/plebian, citizen/foreigner)
o Categories are problem-solving social interventions and/or byproducts of social interactions
Their boundaries do crucial organizational work
o Categories have social boundaries that function to include and exclude
As Max Weber noted almost a century ago, the creation of what he called “social closure” advances
efforts by the powerful to exclude less powerful people from the full benefits of joint enterprises, while
facilitating efforts by underdogs to organize for the seizure of benefits denied.
A relationship is likely to be closed
In the process, members of two antagonistic groups might elaborate compelling stories about each
other’s perfidy and utter incompatibility.
o What causes the location and shape of boundaries?
Let us distinguish among three overlapping origins: invention, borrowing, and by-products of network
encounters.
At one extreme, powerful actors or clusters of actors deliberately manufacture boundaries and
accompanying stories
They also generate stories that participants subsequently use to explain and justify their interactions
The stories embody shared understandings of who we are, who they are, what divides us, and
what connects us. People create such stories in the context of previously available cultural
materials: shared concepts, beliefs, memories, symbols, myths, local knowledge.
Once in place, these stories constrain subsequent interactions across the boundary, modifying only slowly
in response to those interactions
, Different combinations of encounters, barriers, and stories generate definitions of categories as centering
on class, citizenship, age, or locality
His analysis builds a bridge from Max Weber, on social closure to Karl Marx on exploitation, and back
To understand what inequality looks like in a certain society, need to understand the patterns in that society
o These are not equal in society, have different meanings attached to them
o Products of social interactions, interventions
We all compete with each other
Certain mechanisms that help to distribute disadvantages and advantages
Why are categories durable?
“last from one social interaction to the next . . . [and] persist over whole careers, lifetimes and organizational histories”
o It does not mean that they are static, they are changing slowly
o There is a path dependency, a legacy
Durable inequality among categories arises because people who control access to value-producing resources solve
pressing organizational problems by means of categorical distinctions
o Inadvertently or otherwise, those people set up systems of social closure, exclusion, and control
o Variation in the form and durability of inequality therefore depends chiefly on the nature of the resources
involved, the previous social locations of the categories, the character of the organizational problems, and the
configurations of interested parties.
Inequalities are (re)produced and maintained by central mechanisms that make them pervasive and enduring
o Durable inequality depends heavily on the institutionalization of categorical pairs
The four core mechanisms to maintain inequality
Mechanisms that generate durable inequality (when their agents incorporate paired and unequal categories at crucial
organizational boundaries)
1) Exploitation
Based on Marx’s concept
Powerful, connected people command resources from which they draw significantly increased returns by coordinating the
effort of outsiders whom they exclude from the full value added by that effort.
Examples:
o Slavery
o Apartheid system in South Africa
2) Opportunity hoarding
Here Tilly takes Weber’s concept of social closure
Members of a categorically bounded network hoard their access to a resource that is valuable, renewable, subject to
monopoly supportive of network activities, and enhanced by the network’s modus operandi.
Creating beliefs and practices that sustain their control
o They set up systems of “social closure, exclusion, and control.”
Between insiders and outsiders
This is usually what the non-elite, people who lack great power do
o They cannot extract surplus, but hoard access to different opportunities and try to monopolize them
o People that make the best out of these opportunities and inequalities
Often the two parties gain complementary, if unequal, benefits from jointly excluding others.
Examples:
o Chain migration: dominate occupational niche
Italians migrated because they were working in the country side and during winter no work, so went
abroad – first to France, then us
, Some returned to Italy, others stayed and started working in other things (garden scaping) and became
known and up until to this day they have monopolized the business of land scaping.
o The middle class and schooling system
Mechanisms that generalize, maintain inequality (these reinforce the effectiveness of categorical distinctions)
3) Emulation
The copying of established organizational models and/or the transplanting of existing social relations from one setting to
another
o Diffusion effect
This transfer makes categories appear pervasive and thus inevitable
Examples:
o Colonial relations and classifications
Rulers adopted the idea of having a middle man between the colonial power and the colonized people
o A new high tech start up introduces division of labor (including distinctions in gender, race and age) greatly
resembling other companies in the same industry. Reducing costs of start-up
4) Adaptation
This is a social process that exists outside the direct realm of inequality, but that sustains unequal, categorical systems.
The elaboration of daily routines such as mutual aid, political influence, courtship, and information gathering on the basis of
categorically unequal structures.
Creation of everyday procedures and practices that people use to cope with and so reproduce the categorical distinctions in
their daily interactions
o How people deal with their position
o Inequality is something we all do on a daily basis, we might challenge it but it is complicated, so most of the times
we develop mechanisms of adaptation
Examples:
o Military conscripts develop to deal with their officers
o Support structures between domestic workers (sharing childcare duties, setting up joint transport system)
People who create or sustain categorical inequality by means of the four basic mechanisms rarely set out to manufacture inequality
as such. Instead they solve other organizational problems by establishing categorically unequal access to valued outcomes
But, once undertaken, exploitation and opportunity hoarding pose their own organizational problems: how to maintain
distinctions between insiders and outsiders; how to ensure solidarity; loyalty, control, and succession; how to monopolize
knowledge that favors profitable use of sequestered resources
The installation of explicitly categorical boundaries helps to solve such organizational problems
These are complementary
A certain kind of inequality therefore becomes prevalent over a large population in two complementary ways.
o Either the categorical pair in question—male/female, legitimate/illegitimate, black/white, citizen/noncitizen, and
so on—operates in organizations that control major resources affecting welfare, and its effects spread from there
o Or the categorical pair repeats in a great many similar organizations, regardless of their power.
Tilly identifies causal mechanisms, not causes
Also, while Tilly identifies these mechanisms of production and reproduction he hardly deals with change or mechanisms
that challenge durable inequalities. Argues that change requires re-organization of social and political structures (not simply
changes of attitudes)
Tilly avoids the concept of structural inequalities and instead promotes a relational, contextual, hence dynamic approach:
inequalities change
The outcomes of the 4 causal mechanisms vary in place and time
o Local categorical distinctions gain strength and operate at lower cost when matched with widely available paired
and unequal categories
