Twelfth Global Studies Conference

Abstract

More than two decades ago, the topic of inequality was brought back on the social science agenda. The renewed interest in social disparities, polarizing incomes, exclusion and poverty started in the research departments of regional development agencies and became a contested topic in the World Development Report from 2006. Ten years later, even the IMF and the OECD identified inequality in its different dimensions as a prime challence for global public policy. The new discourse on inequality reacted to two trends. First, to the increasingly visible effects of the dominant paradigm of social change since the 1980s: The wave of marketization which started in Latin America and spread to the post-communist region, did not deliver the promised results. In many places the spoils of political change were appropriated by new and old elites with privileged access to political power. Second, to shortcomings in the social sciences: The mainstream approaches in economics as well as in social theory had lost inequalities out of sight during the 1980s and stylized the trade-off between equality and efficiency into a principal barrier against redistributive policies. The paper will present the theoretical progress in the recent, more critical debates on global inequalities. Special emphasis will be laid on two spill-over mechanisms from economic inequality into to political sphere: (a) the policy capture by old and new elites and (b) the reorganization of marginalized strata in populist movements.