Anti-elitism toward wealth elites in communication

Democracies appear unresponsive to the problem of rising wealth inequality, even though the top 1% has captured 38% of global wealth increases since the mid-1990s. This project foregrounds the underexplored role of communication in mediating inequality and democratic responsiveness. Communication matters to the politics of wealth inequality because it shapes citizens’ ideas about the underlying wealth distribution, and how wealth inequality is problematised (or not) within democratic political systems (such as through demands to “tax the rich”). The project uses computational methods to identify when wealth elites attract anti-elitist sentiment in different contexts, from news to social media. This will enable systematic study of wealth elites and anti-elitism in 21st century communication, examining its relation on the one hand to underlying material wealth distributions, and on the other to resonant discourses like greed and meritocracy.