How politics became a contest dominated by two kinds of elite | Amory Gethin and others

Studying hundreds of elections, we found that political parties increasingly cater to only the well educated and the rich

Given the steep rise in economic inequality in many parts of the world since the 1980s, one might have expected to see increasing political demands for the redistribution of wealth and the return of class-based politics. This didn't quite happen - or at least not straightforwardly.

To make sense of the big picture, we studied the long-term evolution of political divides in 50 western and non-western democracies, using a new database on the vote that covers more than 300 elections held between 1948 and 2020.

Amory Gethin, Clara Martinez-Toledano and Thomas Piketty are the authors of Political Cleavages and Social Inequalities: A Study of Fifty Democracies, 1948-2020