The grass is always greener on the other side: (Unfair) inequality and support for democracy

Abstract

Does inequality undermine support for democracy? While previous research has either focused on macro-level associations or alleged a uniform relationship between inequality and individual democratic support across countries, this paper documents the importance of the current regime type and of the source of inequality for such a linkage. Exploiting differential transition to democracy after the collapse of the Soviet Union allows to investigate the association of democratic support across regimes with differing levels of democracy. Inequality is found to erode democratic support in democracies and to foster democratic beliefs in non-democracies. In other words, inequality always subverts individual-level support for the current regime type. Further, evidence is provided for the relevance of disentangling the sources of economic inequality in line with fairness concerns: While unfair inequality (generated by factors beyond an individual’s control) and total inequality both are significantly correlated to democratic support, unfair inequality appears to be the relevant inequality component driving this association.