Varieties of Egalitarianism. Mapping the Politics of Inequality with Online Crowdcoding

• Applicant: Dr. Alexander Horn
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 428250727

Despite the undisputed political and societal relevance of economic inequality, we know nothing about how parties conceive of and speak about (in-)equality and how that affects inequality. This is remarkable considering that parties are pivotal actors in representative democracy and given that voters’ attitudes towards (in-)equality are subject to a host of studies and datasets. To address this gap, the project makes innovative use of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ to map how parties in 10 OECD countries since 1980 conceive of equality and how that affects policy choices and inequality patterns. The project’s first aim is to gather data on how concepts of equality differ across countries and parties. The concepts of equality are defined by the extent to which equality is conceived of as equality of outcome, equal chances and social mobility, equal rights and non-discrimination, in other specific (e.g. ecological) terms, or only mentioned without specification. The data is gathered through Online Crowdcoding of political texts. Multiple independent judgments are combined for each coding of a text fragment – following the idea of the wisdom of the crowd, according to which aggregation of independent judgments of laypersons can lead to results on par with the results of experts. My recent work shows under which conditions the crowd can match experts even for coding tasks thus far considered too complex. Based on the use of IP addresses and 5000 test questions that will be calibrated by the research group, the category scheme will be scaled up to 1,000,000 coder judgments. This approach combines the context sensitivity of experts with the unmatched reproducibility, speed, and cost-efficiency of crowd coding. Based on the resulting data, the project group will trace changes in the concepts of equality and look at the extent to which parties agree on them. In addition to general trends and questions of convergence and divergence, specific questions, e.g., the contested idea that parties have de-emphasized economic equality, will be tested. One of the most visible deliverables of this project phase will be a publicly available ‘Varieties of Egalitarianism’ database. The second aim is to find out how the concepts of equality shape policies and inequality. We will assess the effects of equality concepts on policy profiles and on a broad set of inequality outcomes. We will also examine how equality concepts and policy choices interact in shaping inequality. To understand these linkages between equality concepts, policies, and inequality, the impact of various economic and institutional conditions and the relevance of the time horizon we look at will be taken into account. The analysis will be based on regression analysis that uses data on approximately 100 governments in the 10 countries, but will be combined with case studies of three OECD countries with vastly different political systems and types of market economies (Denmark, Germany, the US).

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups