EQUALEU is a prospective research project investigating the nexus of different forms of inequality and their impact on democracy. The EUQALEU consortium has applied for funding from the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme of the European Commission in response to the call 'Reversing Inequalities and Promoting Fairness' in the 2016/2017 work programme.
The project is to be carried out by an international consortium of eight European universities and research centres. It brings together experts from the fields of economics, political science, sociology and law to study the different aspects of inequality from an interdisciplinary perspective.
The project is committed to close cooperation with stakeholders from civil society, NGOs and trade unions and aims to deliver innovative policy recommendations. In so doing, the academic partners are support by distinguished practitioners on the advisory board.
The project is led by Professor David Soskice at LSE where it is based in the International Inequalities Institute (III). The other partner institutions are the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (IBEI), the University of Copenhagen, the University of Geneva, the Hertie School of Governance (Berlin), the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques (Sciences Po, Paris), the Median Research Centre (Bucharest) and Trinity College Dublin (TCD).
EQUALEU - Understanding Inequalities, Reinvigorating European Democracies
In what ways has increased inequality contributed to problems of democratic functioning, with declining political participation and trust and the growth of populist challenger parties? We argue that the long-term shift from the Fordist era to contemporary Knowledge Economies has created major groups of Winners and Losers. We will show that Winners have been strongly biased to large cities, graduates, highly skilled workers, and younger age groups, whereas Losers are in smaller urban areas, non-graduate, older, less skilled and more male. We investigate how these long-term processes have ‘hollowed out’ the middle classes and created a disadvantaged “precariat”.
Bringing together multiple disciplinary perspectives and combining cross-national and cross-temporal quantitative analysis with innovative use of experimental methods and country case studies, we explore the impact of inequalities on political participation and preference formation. We examine the changing role of participatory institutions and environments, including social networks in big cities, trade unions and workplaces and political parties, as well as the role of the internet in facilitating political discussions and information acquisition. The reverse causal effects are also explored, namely how patterns of inequalities in participation have shaped the incentives of political elites to respond to the preferences of marginalised groups.
In developing policy proposals to ameliorate democratic functioning in the face of these inequalities, we collaborate with stakeholder organisations at two levels: First, we make recommendations concerning the role of social investment through education, training, work-life balance policies to increase labour market participation and integration of disadvantaged groups. Second, we develop tools and strategies for direct intervention by NGOs, unions and parties to increase participation, including web-based platforms for participation.
David Soskice (Principal Investigator) has been the School Professor of Political Science and Economics at the LSE since 2012 in the Department of Government and European Institute. He taught macroeconomics at Oxford (emeritus fellow, University College), was then research director/professor at the Wissenschaftzentrum Berlin (1990-2005), and subsequently Research Professor of Comparative Political Economy at Oxford and senior research fellow at Nuffield College. He has been visiting professor in the economics department at Berkeley, the Government Department at Harvard, the Industrial Relations School at Cornell, and the Scuola Superiore St Anna, Pisa, and held the Mars Visiting professorship at Yale and the Semans Distinguished Visiting professorship at Duke. With Wendy Carlin (UCL) he recently published Macroeconomics: Instability, Institutions and the Financial System (OUP, 2015). He gave the 2013 Federico Caffѐ lectures in Rome on Knowledge Economies: Winners and Losers. With Peter Hall (Harvard) he edited Varieties of Capitalism (OUP 2001); and he is currently working with Torben Iversen (Harvard) on a book on democratic politics, advanced capitalism and knowledge economies. He was President of the European Political Science Association from 2011 to 2013; he is an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford; and he is a Fellow of the British Academy (Politics and Economics groups), and currently chair of the British Academy Working Group on Multidisciplinarity.
Sara Hobolt is Sutherland Chair in European Institutions and a Professor and Deputy Head of the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Previously, she has held posts at the University of Oxford and the University of Michigan. She has published extensively on European Union politics, elections and referendums. Her book Europe in Question: Referendums on European Integration (Oxford University Press, 2009) was awarded the Best Book prize by the European Union Studies Association in 2010. Her most recent book is Blaming Europe? Attribution of Responsibility in the European Union, (Oxford University Press, with James Tilley). In 2011, she was awarded the APSA emerging scholar award for her contribution to the field of elections, public opinion and voting behaviour. She was the 2012 winner of the Nils Kim prize, awarded by the Ludvig Holberg Memorial Fund to a young Nordic researcher who has made an outstanding contribution in the social sciences and humanities. She is Chair of the European Election Studies (EES), an EU-wide project studying voters, parties, candidates and the media in European Parliamentary elections.
Aina Gallego is assistant professor at the Barcelona Institute of International Studies (IBEI) and has previously been a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford University. She currently holds a Marie Curie Career Integration Grant awarded by the European Commission to outstanding young researchers. She was also awarded a Ramon y Cajal Fellowship, the most prestigious junior level fellowship in Spain, for which she was ranked no.1 in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Aina Gallego is a leading expert in the theme of the project, inequalities in political participation. Her dissertation on inequalities in voter turnout, defended at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in December 2008, won the Juan Linz price to the best dissertation in Spain. The book I has been published in 2105 by Cambridge University Press, the most prestigious academic press in the field. Her article ‘Understanding Unequal Turnout: Education and Voting in Comparative Perspective’ has been widely cited and has consistently been among the most downloaded ones in Electoral Studies since its publication in 2010. Other work has been published in leading journals in political science such as the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, or Political Behavior. Aina Gallego is also an expert in survey experiments. Her Marie Curie Career Integration explores methods to combine experimental and observational research and she has taught numerous courses on experimental design.
David Dreyer Lassen is professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Copenhagen. He has held visiting positions at Harvard on several occasions, and published extensively in political economy and on (causal determinants of) political behaviour and political attitudes. He is the recipient of a Research Leader grant from the Danish Council for Independent Research and an ERC Consolidator grant, he is the 2016 winner of the Danish Ministry of Research annual EliteResearch Prize, and will be directing the Center for Social Data Science at the University of Copenhagen, to be launched in late Spring 2016. He is deputy chairman of the Danish Social Science Research Council, and a board member of NORFACE, the New Opportunities for Research Funding Agency Co-operation in Europe.
Jonas Pontusson is Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Geneva and Associate Dean of the Geneva School of Social Sciences. He received his doctorate in political science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1986. He taught at Cornell for nearly years prior to moving to Princeton in 2005 and then to Geneva in 2010. Pontusson has also held visiting scholar positions at Nuffield College, Oxford (1987-88), the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala (1991) and the Russell Sage Foundation in New York (2004-05). He will spend 2016-17 as a Visiting Scholar at the Hertie School of Governance in Berlin. Pontusson has contributed extensively to the literature on national models of capitalism and to the literature on the politics of inequality and redistribution in OECD countries. His publications in the latter domain have focused on the following topics: the institutional and political determinants of earnings inequality; how tax-and-transfer systems respond to changes in the distribution of “pre-fisc” household income; government partisanship and unionization as determinants of redistribution; and how the structure of inequality affects the policy preferences of middle-income citizens. More recently, Pontusson has begun to tackle the question of the distributive prerequisites and implications of macroeconomic growth models. As Associate Dean, he is responsible for developing an interdisciplinary a research program in comparative and international political economy at the University of Geneva
Anke Hassel is Professor of Public Policy and PhD director at the Hertie School of Governance and member of the faculty of the Berlin Graduate School for Transnational Studies. She held previous positions at the International University Bremen and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. She was a Senior Visiting Fellow at the European Institute of the London School of Economics, the Social Science Research Centre Berlin and King's College, Cambridge, UK. In 2003/2004, she was seconded to the Planning Department of the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Labour (BMWA). She received Fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, Volkswagen Stiftung, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung and Hans Böckler Stiftung. In 2012/13, she served as an Expert Member of the Enquete Commission of the German Federal Parliament on “Growth, Wealth, Quality of Life”. She studies the effects of labour relations and trade unions for contemporary democracies and has recently published “Trade Unions and the Future of Democratic Capitalism”. In: Pablo Beramendi, Silja Häusermann, Herbert Kitschelt, Hanspeter Kriesi (eds.): The Politics of Advanced Capitalism. Cambridge University Press.
Bruno Palier is CNRS Research Director at Sciences Po, Centre d’études européennes. Trained in social science, he has a PHD in Political science, and is a former student of Ecole Normale Superieure. He is studying welfare reforms in Europe. He is co-director of LIEPP (Laboratory for interdisciplinary Evaluaiton of Public Policies). He is Honorary Professor in Welfare state research at the University of South Denmark. He was Guest Professor at the University of Stockholm (Spring 2009 and 2010), Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University (Spring quarter 2007), at Center for European Studies from Harvard University in 2001 and Jean Monnet Fellow in the European University Institute in Florence in 1998-1999. He is Member of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) Executive Council. He has published numerous articles on welfare reforms in France and in Europe in Politics and Society, Journal of European Social Policy, West European Politics, Governance, Socio-Economic Review, Global Social Policy, Social Politics, and various books.
Marina Popescu is the Director of Median Research Centre, and holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Essex, United Kingdom (2008). She is currently Assistant Professor in Political Communication at the Central European University in Budapest, a position she held since having finished her British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Essex, United Kingdom, in 2012. She was also an Open Society Institute International Policy Fellow, consulting for OSCE/ODIHR and G17 in Belgrade, Serbia. She taught at Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, and at the School of Public Policy, University College London. She is the co-author of the book Embodying Democracy and has published papers in respected journals, such as International Journal of Communication, Electoral Studies, and the International Journal of Sociology. The various research projects Dr. Popescu was involved in included the ESRC-funded Elections and Political Transformation in Post-Communist Europe project, for three years, being in charge of developing an online database (in collaboration with IFES – the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, in Washington DC and ACEEEO – the Association of Central and Eastern Europe Election Officials, in Budapest), and of analysing qualitative and quantitative.
Anne Wren is a political economist specializing in labour markets and knowledge based economies. In 2006 she was the recipient of a Marie Curie Excellence Team Award (Total funding € 1, 161, 216) to direct an inter-disciplinary research team working on “Political Responses to Economic Change: De-Industrialization, Globalization and Service Sector Development” at Trinity College Dublin (2006-2010). In recognition of her work on this topic she was shortlisted (in 2014) for the inaugural New Statesman/SPERI award, awarded to the scholar who has succeeded most effectively in disseminating original and critical ideas in political economy to a wider public audience. Her publications in this area include The Political Economy of the Service Transition (Ed.), (OUP, 2013); the “The End of the Consensus: Labour Market Developments and the Politics of Retrenchment” (with Philipp Rehm), Socio-economic Review (2014). She obtained her Ph.D in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University in 2000; was Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University (2000-2006); and currently teaches courses on political economy, inequality, and public policy at Trinity College Dublin.
Further participants
-
Professor Nicola Lacey, LSE
-
Professor Mike Savage, LSE
-
Professor Alan Manning, LSE
-
Dr Ellen Helsper, LSE
-
Professor Michael Storper, LSE
-
Dr Cesc Amat, IPEG Barcelona
-
Dr Jacob Gerner Hariri, University of Copenhagen
-
Professor Lucio Baccaro, University of Geneva
-
Professor Nonna Mayer, Sciences Po
-
Professor Gábor Tóka, Central European University
-
Dr Mihail Chiru, Median Research Centre
-
Dr Andrija Henjak, University of Zagreb
-
Professor Gail McElroy Trinity College, Dublin