Trends in Political Science Research: Economic Inequality and Political Participation

Abstract

This Trends article reviews recent scholarship (2020-2024) on the relationship between economic inequality and political participation. For decades, research has been guided by two dominant theories: Conflict Theory (CT), which posits that inequality stimulates political engagement, and Relative Power Theory (RPT), which conversely predicts that inequality depresses participation. Despite their prominence, empirical studies seeking to adjudicate between both theories have produced contradictory results. Synthesizing the recent literature, this article argues that such inconsistencies have prompted a shift away from assessing whether inequality uniformly increases (CT) or decreases (RPT) political participation. Instead, contemporary scholarship has turned to investigating the conditions under which inequality mobilizes or demobilizes citizens. Three major trends drive this reorientation: (1) the expansion of economic inequality measures beyond national-level income indicators to include finer-grained and subjective operationalizations; (2) the broadening of the concept of political participation beyond voter turnout to encompass diverse participatory behaviors; and (3) the growing examination of mediating and moderating variables that condition the inequalityparticipation relationship. Collectively, this article argues that these developments demonstrate that RPT and CT are best conceptualized as conditional rather than universal explanatory frameworks.