Abstract

In cross-national empirical work on income inequality and government redistribution, the greatest emphasis has been on the extremes of the income scale. Less work has been done on groups that are neither rich nor poor—the middle class. The lack of attention to this group is unfortunate for several reasons. Most obviously, the middle class, if defined as the three middle income quintile groups, is by far the largest income group, and its fortunes play a correspondingly major role in determining those of society as a whole. In the political sphere, the middle class is a decisive actor in every developed country, one that has been assiduously courted by both the left and the right—with good reason, since support from at least part of the middle class is an indispensible component of nearly every governing coalition. Beyond this, the relative economic standing of the middle class is widely believed to have declined since the early 1980s. The political causes and implications of this have rarely been explored, at least in cross-national empirical work. The intention of this paper is to examine several aspects of middle class politics and economics in the developed world over the last 25 years. Specifically, we consider the relationship between, on the one hand, government redistribution toward and away from middle income groups and, on the other, the degree and nature of political participation by those groups. The chapter is divided into three parts. The first offers a detailed description of government redistribution as it affects middle income groups. The second presents the results of a national-level unbalanced pooled cross-sectional/time series analysis of 75 country-years covering the period from 1979 to 2005. The third part of the paper offers a description of cross-national variation in several modes of political participation at the level of income quintile group, including voting, belonging to a labor union, contacting an elected official and participating in a protest or demonstration. This section includes a multilevel analysis for which disaggregated data are available for both for government redistribution and various modes of political participation.

Authors (3)