Desigualdad económica y actitudes hacia la Democracia

Abstract

Economic inequality and the functioning of democracy are two of the most relevant and controversial issues in contemporary societies. Inequality in the world and in Spain has proliferated in recent years (Piketty, 2019) and is expected to continue growing in the future (Alvaredo et al., 2018) if no concrete measures are taken to prevent it (Farhat, 2020; Stiglitz, 2016). Furthermore, the popularity of democracies around the world, and the satisfaction with the way democracy and democratic institutions work have declined (Brosius et al., 2020; Catterberg & Moreno, 2006; Freedom House, 2021). Accordingly, in this dissertation, we aim to analyze the relationship between economic inequality and attitudes toward democracy. Particularly, the empirical part of this thesis tried to find out how perceptions of economic inequality affect trust in institutions, perceptions of and satisfaction with the democratic political system, perceptions of citizens' political efficacy, and civic and political behavior (i.e., intentions to cooperate and participate in collective action). The current dissertation is structured in three sections. The first section, Chapter 1, presents the conceptual framework. In Chapter 2, we outline our research questions, aims, and specific objectives. In the second part, we present the empirical studies. In Chapter 3, we aimed to adapt the support for economic inequality scale (SEIS, Wiwad et al., 2019), and examined through two correlational studies how it is related to other socio-political variables. Our results showed that SEIS has good sources of validity and reliability evidence. For instance, it showed that it is closely related to other measures of attitudes toward inequality, and to perceived warmth and competence of people in poverty. In Chapter 4, we conducted three experiments to examine the effect of perceived inequality on institutional trust, perceived democracy, satisfaction with democracy, political efficacy, and environmental collective actions. We found that perceptions of inequality influence attitudes toward the political system, specifically reducing individuals' institutional trust, perceived democracy, satisfaction with democracy, and political efficacy. We also aimed to explore the psychological mechanisms that explain those effects. Our research showed that institutional trust mediates the effect of perceived inequality on political efficacy, and on intentions to participate in collective action. In Chapter 5, we aimed to analyze the causal effect of economic inequality and democratic choice on cooperative behavior using an economic game. We found that in the economic inequality condition, levels of cooperation were lower compared with contexts of low economic inequality. Although we found no evidence for the positive effect of the democratic (vs. non-democratic) choice condition on cooperation, results showed that when a cooperative rule— through a democratic procedure or not— was introduced to motivate cooperation, the differences between inequality conditions disappeared. In Chapter 6, we manipulated perceived democracy and examined its impact on inferred inequality. As expected, perceiving a highly democratic context (vs. a nondemocratic context) trigger lower levels of inferred economic inequality. Perceiving democracy also affected other perceived features of the context, such as economic performance, wealth, and economic development. In the third and last part of this thesis (Chapter 7), we discuss our findings in accordance with our guiding research questions. We also highlight the implications of the current research findings, the limitations of the studies conducted, and new ideas for future lines of research. In short, economic inequality negatively affects the functioning of the socio-political system, ultimately leading to political inequality. Perceived economic inequality affects attitudes toward democracy and the political system in general, and reduces interest in participating in politics, which also contributes to political inequality. Consequently, political decisions will benefit the population unequally, thus ultimately contributing to the maintenance of economic inequality (Bartels, 2016; Farhat, 2020).