The empirical starting point for anyone who wants to understand political cleavages in the democratic world, based on a unique dataset covering fifty countries since World War II. Who votes for whom and why? Why has growing inequality in many parts of the world not led to renewed class-based conflicts, seeming instead to have come with the emergence of new divides over identity and integration? News analysts, scholars, and citizens interested in exploring those questions inevitably lack relevant data, in particular the kinds of data that establish historical and international context. Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities provides the missing empirical background, collecting and examining a treasure trove of information on the dynamics of polarization in modern democracies. The chapters draw on a unique set of surveys conducted between 1948 and 2020 in fifty countries on five continents, analyzing the links between voters’ political preferences and socioeconomic characteristics, such as income, education, wealth, occupation, religion, ethnicity, age, and gender. This analysis sheds new light on how political movements succeed in coalescing multiple interests and identities in contemporary democracies. It also helps us understand the conditions under which conflicts over inequality become politically salient, as well as the similarities and constraints of voters supporting ethnonationalist politicians like Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro, Marine Le Pen, and Donald Trump. Bringing together cutting-edge data and historical analysis, editors Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, and Thomas Piketty offer a vital resource for understanding the voting patterns of the present and the likely sources of future political conflict.

Recommended on 1 episode:

‘Why Haven’t the Democrats Completely Cleaned the Republicans’ Clock?’

Political analysts used to say that the Democratic Party was riding a demographic wave that would lead to an era of dominance. But that “coalition of the ascendant” never quite jelled. The party did benefit from a rise in nonwhite voters and college-educated professionals, but it has also shed voters without a college degree. All this has made the Democrats’ political math a lot more precarious. And it also poses a kind of spiritual problem for Democrats who see themselves as the party of the working class. Ruy Teixeira is one of the loudest voices calling on the Democratic Party to focus on winning these voters back. He’s a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the politics editor of the newsletter The Liberal Patriot. His 2002 book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” written with John B. Judis, was seen as prophetic after Barack Obama won in 2008 with the coalition he’d predicted. But he also warned in that book that Democrats needed to stop hemorrhaging white working-class voters for this majority to hold. And now Teixeira and Judis have a new book, “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?: The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes.” In this conversation, I talk to Teixeira about how he defines the working class; the economic, social and cultural forces that he thinks have driven these voters from the Democratic Party; whether Joe Biden’s industrial and pro-worker policies could win some of these voters back, or if economic policies could reverse this trend at all; and how to think through the trade-offs of pursuing bold progressive policies that could push working-class voters even further away.

Books recommended:

• 📕  Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities: A Study of Fifty Democracies, 1948–2020 by Amory Gethin, Clara Martínez-Toledano, Thomas Piketty
• 📘  Visions of Inequality: From the French Revolution to the End of the Cold War by Branko Milanovic
• 📗  The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution by Yuri Slezkine

Ruy Teixeira Feb. 1, 2024 3 books recommended

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