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"The world has witnessed the creation of new democracies and the maturing of old ones. Yet, everywhere there is democracy, there is also political inequality. Voices of everyday folk struggle to be heard; often, they keep silent. Governments respond mostly to the influential and the already privileged. Our age of democracy, then, is the old age of inequality. This book builds on U.S. scholarship on the topic of political inequality to understand its forms, causes and consequences around the world. Comprised of nine theoretical, methodological and empirical chapters, this path-creating edited collection contains original works by both established and young, up-and-coming social scientists, including those from Latin America, Eastern Europe, Greece and the U.S. Political Inequality in an Age of Democracy addresses the present and future of the concept of political inequality from multi-disciplinary and cross-national perspectives"--

Whereas social scientists have devised various ways to measure representation gaps between the political elite and the masses across nations and time, few datasets can be used to measure this gap for particular social groups. Minding the gap between what parties social groups vote for and what parties actually attain seats in parliament can reveal the position of social groups in the political power structure. We help to fill this gap with a new publicly available dataset, Party Representation of Social Groups (PaReSoGo), consisting of 25 countries and 150 country-years, and a method for its construction. We used the European Social Survey 2002–2016 and ParlGov data for this time span to create a Dissimilarity Index. To demonstrate the utility and flexibility in the combination of cross-national surveys and administrative data, we chose social groups of gender, age, and education, as well as intersectional groups based on gender and age, and attitudinal groups. We conclude this research note with empirical illustrations of PaReSoGo's use.

Democracy's normative foundation is political equality. Yet the dominance of the elite over the masses, and the systematic exclusion of particular social and economic groups from the influence on, and outcomes of, important decisions, manifests in political inequality. If this situation is normatively intolerable, why does political inequality endure? We build on the theoretical and empirical literature of politics and inequality and the collection of articles in this special issue to argue that the reproduction of political inequality within and across nations and time results from two key interrelated mechanisms: elite coordination and mass discoordination. We discuss how these mechanisms shape patterns of contestation and participation that reproduce inequalities in both old and new democracies.

Democracy's normative foundation is political equality. Yet the dominance of the elite over the masses, and the systematic exclusion of particular social and economic groups from the influence on, and outcomes of, important decisions, manifests in political inequality. If this situation is normatively intolerable, why does political inequality endure? We build on the theoretical and empirical literature of politics and inequality and the collection of articles in this special issue to argue that the reproduction of political inequality within and across nations and time results from two key interrelated mechanisms: elite coordination and mass discoordination. We discuss how these mechanisms shape patterns of contestation and participation that reproduce inequalities in both old and new democracies.

AbstractBackgroundIn the digital age, contacting a public official is a direct, low‐cost means of influence, but most cross‐national surveys ignore it.ObjectiveWe go in‐depth on "contact" to define it, present how it has appeared in major cross‐national surveys since the 1960s, and how survey respondents might understand it today. We then explore its popularity and determinants in Europe across time.MethodsWe use the Survey Data Recycling project's Cotton File and the European Social Survey (ESS) 2002 and 2018.ResultsOf nine major international survey projects that have this item, only ESS regularly includes it. Across Europe, the popularity of contact did not change much, and the factors that associate with generalized contact in 2002 are the same as in 2018.ConclusionData producers should test the meaning of contact among respondents and differentiate between generalized and particularized forms.

In recent decades, many countries ranging from quasidemocratic regimes to well-established democracies have faced democratic backsliding. In this study, we draw on Foa and Mounk and other related literature to examine the effects of regime delegitimation on democratic backsliding, focusing on youth's trust in political institutions—parliament, legal systems, and political parties—relative to trust of the older population. We use an unbalanced panel data set that combines a country-year indicator of liberal democracy from the Varieties of Democracy project with aggregate survey-based measures of absolute and relative institutional trust from the Survey Data Recycling database; the data set covers 46 countries from 2009 to 2017. We find that the ratio of youth's institutional trust to that of older persons has a substantive effect on the quality of liberal democracy in the future, and that the effect is amplified by the relative size of the youth population.

If researchers wish to use surveys to understand the attitudes and behaviors of those who live in former State Socialist countries, they face a research landscape densely populated by cross-sectional studies. Panel surveys with individuals as the units of analysis, which are ideal for understanding change within people over time, are rare. As a service to researchers, this article presents possibilities for cross-national comparison via two sets publicly available panel data: the Polish Panel Survey POLPAN (focusing on its 2013 and 2018 waves) and the novel Romanian World Values Survey Panel RO-WVS (2012 and 2018 waves), which is the only panel version of World Values Survey (WVS). We present the research designs of each, and explore their ex-post harmonization. Conceptual overlap between these sources occurs mainly (but not only) with major socio-demographics and with political attitudes and behavior, including interest in politics, political participation, democratic values, and institutional trust. Whereas POLPAN is relatively well known, we argue that RO-WVS panel stands out as a unique resource that provides data on the dynamic nexus between social structure and cultural context. Keeping RO-WVS alive for a long period would help researchers to understand Romanian society in the European context, and provide for future comparisons between it and its neighbors.