Addressing Inequality

Rueschemeyer, Dietrich.
Journal of Democracy, Volume 15, Number 4, October 2004, pp. 76-90 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/jod.2004.0072

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The Quality of Democracy

ADDRESSING INEQUALITY
Dietrich Rueschemeyer

Dietrich Rueschemeyer is professor of sociology and Charles C. Tillinghast, Jr., Professor of International Studies Emeritus at Brown University. He currently holds an appointment as research professor at Browns Watson Institute of International Studies.

Equality points to one of the critical dimensions along which the qual-

ity of democracy varies. What is at stake is political equality, not equality in all areas of social life. Yet the structures of social and economic inequality are intertwined with political equality, and shape it in profound ways both directly and indirectly. Dominant groups can use their social and economic power resources more or less directly in the political sphere. And they can use their status and influence over education, cultural productions, and mass communicationstheir cultural hegemony, in shortto shape in a less direct way the views, values, and preferences of subordinate groups. If these effects of social and economic inequality are not substantially contained, political equality will be extremely limited. Even in its minimal and most formal varieties, democracy creates a measure of political equality by giving every adult an equal vote. Yet the democratic ideal demands much more. As Robert A. Dahl says, it requires the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals.1 This ideal stands in tension with the inevitable embeddedness of political decision making in social structures of power and influence. The distance between the ideal and the reality of democratic equality has varied greatly over time and continues to vary widely from one country to another. In each instance, this equality gap represents a compromise between dominant groups and the many. We know in outline which factors shape such compromises. The list includes the power balance within society, the relations between the state and civil society, international power constellations, the organization and degree of cultural autonomy that
Journal of Democracy Volume 15, Number 4 October 2004

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subordinate groups enjoy, and the extent to which dominant groups see democratization as a threat to their interests.2 Even the most elementary forms of democracy require a certain zone of autonomy within which political decision making can take place. Politics must be differentiated from the overall structure of power and the system of social inequality as a whole. A democratic polity is conventionally defined by freedoms of expression and association, regular elections with comprehensive suffrage, and the governments responsibility to those elected as the peoples representatives. Such a regime could never subsist under feudalism nor under communism, each of which in its own way fuses political authority with control over labor and the means of production. Critics have deprecated the conventional definition of democracy as merely formal because it works to even out advantages only within a circumscribed political sphere (by safeguarding competition and the rights to free expression and association), while overlooking broader and subtler ways in which social inequality shapes politics. Two important distinctions emerge from these initial observations. The first separates structures and processes that advance or diminish political equality within the relatively autonomous political sphere from those that limit or foster spillovers which begin with inequalities in other areas of life and then flow into the political sphere. The central questions here are: Can one restrain the conversion of wealth or status into political advantage and, if so, how? A second distinction divides measures dealing with spillovers of social inequality into the political sphere from policies that tackle social and economic inequality directly as it affects the degree and scope of political equality. Advancing political equality is clearly not an uncontested goal. It is at odds with major interests, and it may involve the sacrifice of competing values. Opposition to greater political equality, whether based on interest or principle, is likely to vary depending on whether the topic is the political realm narrowly conceived, the conversion of socioeconomic into political advantage, or the overall impact of social inequality on the political sphere.

Normative Questions and Competing Values

Does increasing political equality constitute an unqualified good? Or does it involve sacrificing important other values? If there are tradeoffs, how do we judge different outcomes? This essay will not resolve these normative issues. But given the intertwining of normative and empirical claims that marks discussions about equality, it seems reasonable to sketch some of the major issues to be evaluated and to indicate my views of them. Even if we stay purely within the political realm, there are two major objections to advancing political equality as much as possible. The

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first is that the many are not competent to choose reasonable policies. The second is that increasing the number of participants can worsen coordination problems to the point of system overload and ungovernability. The conventional form of democratic rule, representative democracy, answers most of these objections by interposing a professional state apparatus (answerable to elected officials) between voters and collective-action outcomes.3 Once we take representative democracy for granted, the issues of voter competence and coordination problems vary widely across countries and historical situations. This variation may be decisive in assessing any particular case. Both the objection from competence and the objection from numbers raise issues of reduced efficiency and its costs. While these costs may sometimes be bothersome in practice, they seem outweighed in principle by three considerations of a different sort. First, efficiency takes on substantive meaning only in light of the aims being pursued, and these in turn depend on material and immaterial interests on which people are often divided. Second, a reasonable principle holds that all members of a political community whose interests are affected by collective decisions should have a say in them, even if not all members are learned in the subjects at hand. Affected interests trump limited competence. Finally, political equality is an acknowledgement of the decisively similar dignity of all citizens as human beings who are entitled to the rule of reciprocity. None of this means that trying to cut costs in efficiency is a bad idea. Indeed, it might even be an especially good idea because some efficiency boostersamong them high-quality general education, multiple sources of information and analysis, and trustworthy organizations to represent and aggregate interests that are otherwise at a disadvantage also enhance, as we will see, political equality. Limiting the conversion of assets from other spheres into political advantages is far more controversial. And objections mount even further against policy proposals to level differential assets outside the sphere of politics because spillover effects are too difficult to contain. The most prominent discussion swirls around the political uses of economic assets. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled, much to the outrage of some, that spending money in campaigns for political office enjoys the protection of the First Amendment much like speech. The decision sees this broadened freedom of expression as overriding the concern for democratic equality. The Court, in effect, dealt with economic inequality as if it was irrelevant to the integrity of the democratic political process, and refused to allow the use of direct proscription to limit the conversion of economic advantage into political gain. Alternative ways to erect such limits might include public campaign financing made contingent on candidates acceptance of caps on private contributions as well as the offer of free television time (by far the biggest source of

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expense in modern campaigning) to all qualified candidates. But measures such as these face different political obstacles, and none is likely to shut off the flow of money into politics completely, as interested parties will find ways to circumvent legal obstacles. Economic inequality has consequences for political equality that go far beyond the issues of a level playing field in electoral campaigns. The wealthy can disproportionately influence how policies are made and implemented. Monopolistic and oligopolistic market power in particular can easily be turned into political bargaining advantage. Different levels of government are dependent on investment decisions of large corporations. This applies also to national governments as the mobility of capital across international borders continues to increase. In addition, the majority of the population depends for its economic security on employment. The threat of unemployment is taken for granted in capitalist societies, but it has a major impact on the political dynamics of Western countries. It not only undergirds work discipline but also aligns the interests of workers with those of corporations. All advanced capitalist countries have legislation that seeks to constrain the creation and use of monopolistic economic power. But such measures have at best slowed the trend toward concentration in corporate ownership structures, and have focused on constraining such power asymmetries in strictly economic settings rather than on blunting their impact on politics. Employment security through legal constraints on firing is somewhat stronger in some countries than in others. These measures, currently under attack as labor-market rigidities, have largely a delaying and, in the long run, possibly even an exacerbating effect on unemployment. More important are macroeconomic policies, provisions for training and retraining, and differences in income-replacement policies meant to help tide workers over periods of joblessness. The significance of some degree of income security becomes clear if one compares the political impact of high unemployment in the 1930s, when the jobless of the Great Depression often had virtually nothing to fall back on, with that of similar rates in postcommunist Eastern Europe and parts of Western Europe in the early 1990s, when higher living standards and public supports provided a buffer. Attempts to go further in limiting the conversion of economic power into political gain are subject to fundamental ideological objections and, perhaps more importantly, to pragmatic arguments that the pursuit of equality will harm economic growth. While the value of economic freedom for entrepreneurs and capital owners is in principle hardly a match for the value of increased political equality, claims that measures compromising the functioning of markets will impair growth have persuasive power in all Western countries. The more comprehensive welfare states in advanced capitalist countries insist, however, that this protection of the market mechanism has to be combined with relatively

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generous compensatory measures, which make the functioning of the market socially sustainable.

Wealth Distribution and Cultural Hegemony

If measures to limit the conversion of economic advantage into political power have only a partial effect, does the pursuit of political equality warrant measures that reduce inequalities of income and wealth more directly? There can be little doubt that differences in the distribution of income and wealth across countries and over time within countries make for significant variations in political equality. Competing value claims dominate the discussion of policies meant to change the distribution of income and wealth. It is on the issue of direct political action to reduce income and wealth differentials that the claims of an inherent contradiction between equality and freedom have concentrated. These claims are plausible when we think of sudden policies of increased taxation and expropriation aimed at leveling incomes and wealth. Such policies would be fought by the privileged with all means at their disposal, and breaking this opposition could indeed lead to ruthless dictatorship. Quite clearly, greatly reduced levels of economic inequality would then coincide with the destruction of democratic equality. On the other hand, we know of examplesthe Scandinavian countries are the most prominentwhere popular policy orientations pursued over decades have resulted in significant reductions of after-tax and after-transfer income inequalities. Yet political freedom remained unimpaired, while the scope and quality of political participation in these countries indicate higher levels of democratic equality. As for efficiency considerations, it is worth noting that no long-run drop in economic growth has accompanied these policies. The other major issues beset by value controversies have to do with cultural hegemony. There is little question that the views of the better educated and of people in high-status occupations have a disproportionate influence on the production of culture as well as on its diffusion through education and mass communications. To list a few other major sources of disproportionate influence on popular and high culture, including corporate funding, tax-supported private charities, institutions of higher education, and religious groups, is to realize that in most advanced capitalist countries the groups with disproportionate cultural influence are quite heterogeneous in character. The pattern of cultural influence, then, is pluralistic, but it is unequal nevertheless. And unequal cultural influence creates substantial political inequality. If the material and immaterial interests of the more influential groups have a strong if varied influence on the production and communication of culture and entertainment (an influence that may include promoting distractions from social and political problems), many

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citizens will have a harder time identifying and advancing their own best interests in society, the economy, and political life. Cultural hegemony represents inequality of a peculiar kind: Its effects remain largely invisible to those whose views, values, and preferences it shapes, and they are taken for granted by those whose material and immaterial interests find expression under the hegemonic status quo. Many regard arguments about cultural hegemony as spurious expressions of Marxist ideologythe claims of false consciousness in a new guise. Yet even though its effects may be hard to pin down empirically in a given time and place, each ingredient of the pattern seems beyond doubt in principle. Peoples values and knowledge of society do not simply reflect social and economic interests, but are shaped by education, mass communication, and social networks structured by status differences. Those in positions of influence find it easier to take their own situations for granted and be relatively unruffled by others deprivations. Sponsors of news, entertainment, and the production of high culture may defer to norms and traditions of autonomy of journalism and scholarship, but are often not above seeking to attach influence to their money where this can be done without directly violating such standards. In turn, the standards themselves impose a nonpartisanship on news journalism, teaching, and research that is informally defined in terms of mainstream notions that may be widely acclaimed yet still far from universal. Finally, there is something unreal about a model of politics which assumes that citizens are even roughly equal when it comes to identifying and pursuing their respective interests. This model rejects claims of hegemonic inequality as unpersuasive by simply assuming an essential autonomy and equality of all participants. 4 Policy responses to issues of cultural hegemony and normative arguments about actual and potential policies are complex. Most rich democracies have policies hindering if not obstructing the trend toward concentrated ownership of newspapers, broadcasting networks, publishing firms, and mass-entertainment companies. Most such countries also support public broadcasting systems with a special degree of autonomy, though the generosity of support and the degree of autonomy vary. The standards of news journalism and of academic freedom and analytic universalism constitute an important protection against conversions of wealth and political influence into control over news and research. At the same time, measures that would go beyond these broadly accepted policies of insulating certain cultural institutions and spheres against direct partisan influence are not much discussed. The reasons seem clear. Most people who care about undue influence in cultural production and diffusion are part of the dominant, though internally heterogeneous, mainstream. Efforts to curtail such influence, furthermore, quickly run up against two important and commonly accepted

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injunctions: 1) Do not limit freedom of expression; and 2) respect the autonomy of different cultural spheres such as art, news reporting, or academic research. Since some existing protections against the conversion of economic and political clout into cultural influence rely precisely on these principles, it seems doubtful whether more far-reaching policies at odds with these principles could be reasonable or even have a chance of success. To cap these brief reflections on political inequality and some of the value conflicts that emerge when relevant policies are considered, we should stress that the normative assessment of equality and competing values is analytically distinct from factual assertions about what advances or undermines political equality. Many arguments on the subject tend to mingle normative and factual assertions without being clear on the difference between the two types of claims, which is all the more reason to be clear about it. If competing values argue against trying to rein in processes that have inegalitarian implications, the effects of these processes are not thereby rendered any less real or consequential.

Differential Power Resources

How do disparities in various power resources between the few and the many affect their respective pursuit of such political activities as voting, lobbying government between elections, influencing the opinions of others, and participating in political organizations? Coercive power is a fundamental resource that is inherently distributed unequally. Most states strive to monopolize coercion, albeit with uneven success. Of course, force or threats of force can easily compromise democratic rule. If the state succeeds in monopolizing coercive power, democratic equality is protected only if the use of that power is regulated by law and if equality before the law is sufficiently realized to rule out political advantage from differential intimidation. While this can roughly be taken for granted in most rich democracies today, pockets of private coercive power, sometimes tolerated by the state, and gross imperfections in equality before the law are major factors subverting political equality in many countries belonging to the developing and postcommunist worlds. The state administrative apparatus represents another power resource of great reach, combining expertise, tax-based funding, ready-made organizational capacity, and ultimate recourse to coercion. In liberal political theory, the state looms large as the great adversary of society in the process of democratization. The civil servants in modern states, by contrast, see themselves as neutral executors of the political directives that in a democracy are defined by elected political representatives, though this self-conception antedates the rise of democracy. Valuable as such views may be in a well-run civil service, the realistic tradition of

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political theory from Locke to Marx and Weber has always maintained that civil servants not only tend to take care of their own interests unless constrained by effective injunctions, but also are likely to look with more favor on the interests of people whose social and economic standing resembles their own. Imperfectly steered by small political elites and wielding various relatively subtle means of influence, the complex administrative organizations of modern states preempt a good deal of decision making and can create substantial imbalances in political equality. While the classic barrier to democracy in the nineteenth century was limitation of the franchise, more recent impediments tend to take the form of unequal rules for safeguarding the freedoms of speech and association as well as reductions both formal and informal in the administrative states responsiveness to its putative elected masters. Economic class is, as already indicated, a major obstacle standing in the way of realistic political equality. Until well into the nineteenth century, there was a general consensus among political thinkers that only those with property could be voting members of the political community. Only slowly did the idea of a democratic community inclusive of men from all classes become common, and equal rights for women came to be accepted even later. Capital ownership carries power over marketing, investment, and employment unless competition reduces ownership decisions to an automatic function of the market, a textbook claim that applies to pure models as well asin a rough wayto small owners in competitive markets, but not to major concentrations of capital. This economic power appears in the political sphere as direct bargaining power and more indirectly as persuasive influence. Since control over financial capitalhomeowning and small shareholding asideis highly concentrated in even the richest capitalist countries, both direct bargaining power and indirect influence rest in the hands of a handful of decision makers who often have no political competition or supervision to restrain them. Aside from legislative and administrative attempts to curb growing corporate concentration, encouraging political competition may be the most promising antidote. In developed countries, income distribution tends to be much more even than the distribution of property and capital ownership. At the same time, income distributions vary greatly from one country or region to another, as well as across time periods. The two ends of the distribution have the greatest significance for democratic equality. Poverty means not only a lack of economic resources but also a loss of standing in the community, and those who fall below a certain level of income and status tend to lose political voice as well. The poor are never as powerful a political constituency as their formal voting potential would indicate. In turn, people who earn incomes that exceed average earnings by factors in the hundreds rather than the teens will have dis-

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proportionate political clout despite the best measures seeking to stem the influence of money in politics. It bears repeating that much more is at stake here than the role of money in electoral campaigns. The wealthy have a tremendous influence on all phases of policy making and policy implementation even if direct corruption is effectively under control, which of course it is not in many countries. Socioeconomic inequality has powerful direct and indirect effects on the quality of democratic governance. This is perhaps most evident in Latin America where class inequality is particularly pronounced. In an essay on the long-term divergence of political development in North and South America, Terry Karl speaks of a pathology of inequality in Latin America.5 We misunderstand social status if we think of it simply in terms of prestige. Rather than representing just a point on a scale of esteem, it involves social attachments and aversions. Social status shapes interaction patterns, offering entrance to, and imposing exclusion from, different social circles. Politically most important, it defines the chance to be heard and to be trusted; it increases or diminishes ones political voice.6 The importance of status differentials varies considerably across countries, but both their salience and the steepness of the status hierarchy tend to persist over time. However, some major correlates of status, including economic position and level of education, are not policyindependent, and these can override even persistent differences grounded in ethnic, racial, and gender status. Broadening access to secondary and tertiary education and flattening the distribution of post-tax and post-transfer incomes are likely to reduce both the inequality and the salience of social status in the long run. The change in womens status in the most advanced industrial countries over the past century and a half provides ample evidence of change and persistence as well as of the mechanisms of change. Recent comparative work on the election of women to political office offers an interesting glimpse. Women have better chances in systems of proportional representation than in winner-take-all, single-memberdistrict arrangements. This suggests that it is easier for women to get elected as members of a party list, whose composition is determined by activist organizations and party members, than in the direct confrontation between individual candidates often chosen in broad-based preliminary voting. Changes in gender status in the wider population seem to lag behind politically more active organizations, even as they are influenced by them.7 The unequal influence on the production and diffusion of culture exerted by varied but small cultural, religious, and economic elites constitutes, as noted, a major problem for political equality. It is a problem easily underestimated because what is influenced are the values, views, and preference structures of people, factors whose variation tends to be neglected by simple rationalist individualism.

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Perhaps it is useful to explore these problems of inequality in regard to the specific issue of politically relevant knowledge. Political knowledge is surely a major power resource and its distribution is profoundly unequal. This is true most obviously in the simple sense of information. Those who are favored by education and their position in the networks of information have clear advantages over those less Political knowledge favored. Furthermore, the claim of unequal is surely a major distribution of knowledge holds also for power resource and the background knowledge necessary for its distribution is judging and absorbing the flow of inforprofoundly unequal. mation and for the ability to resist spin. This is true most This is largely a function of education and obviously in the repeated use of such background knowledge. 8 simple sense of Beyond these forms of knowledge, howinformation. ever, there is another, more basic kindthe knowledge that is generated by systematic inquiry. And here the question is not only and not so much how this newly generated knowledge is diffused, but rather whether the problem formulations and specific questions asked in research are shaped by concerns and presuppositions as well as by blind spots that correspond to the concerns and blind spots of select groups while neglecting the interests and perspectives of others more or less completely. An example may make the point more specific. Talcott Parsons reflected faithfully the consensus of family sociology in the 1940s and 1950s when he claimed that the gender division of labor of the American middle-class family with a single breadwinner had a strong functional fit with the prevailing structures of advanced industrial societies and that on a more abstract level it reflected in fact near-universal patterns of sexual division of labor across cultures. It was only after the famous attack on these claims by Betty Friedan that research on the gender division of labor in modern societies came to quite different empirically based results.9 It would be easy to multiply similar if perhaps more subtle examples dealing with working-class issues or matters of race. That feminists and African-Americans have succeeded in establishing scholarly niches staffed exclusively by women and blacks, respectively, may go against norms of scholarly universalism, but it certainly is an indication that for a long time these norms had rather disappointing results. Here it may be useful to note the obvious fact that an underrepresentation of the problems of subordinate classes in scholarly research cannot be tackled in the same way as an underrepresentation of the interests and concerns of ascriptive status groups. Researchers from a lower-class background acquire in the pro-

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cess of their training and career a new social and economic status, and they have better career chances if they stay within established theoretical frameworks of basic assumptions and problem formulation. That the orientation of research is of great importance for long-term political gains is also reflected in the proliferation of privately financed (though tax-supported) think tanks in the United States, the majority of which haveto put it modestlya right-of-center outlook. In many other Western countries, the orientation of similar centers is less weighted toward one side and often balanced by publicly supported institutions. German universities, for instance, have for generations sustained professorships and institutes devoted to welfare-state policies. Cumulative effects of public policy shape to some extent orientations in the academic world. Thus it seems a reasonable guess that the long political dominance of Roosevelts New Deal was one of the factors accounting for the prevalence of liberalism in American higher education before the L-word became a fighting word in conservative counterattacks. Organization for collective action in voluntary associations, unions, and parties is the most promising power resource of the many. It is here that there are possibilities of compensation for the impact of social and economic inequality on democratic politics. Collective organization can mobilize voters and campaigners; it can raise substantial funds if membership and small contributions are numerous enough; it can represent otherwise dispersed interests between elections; and it can compensate to some extent for the cultural hegemony of the most influential groups and institutions, advancing its own views and symbols and shielding followers against the dominant influences. This compensation for the impact of social and economic inequality requires, however, that these organizations are relatively autonomous from dominant groups and responsive to their constituencies. Responsiveness may be endangered by oligarchic tendencies that are hard to control. Furthermore, dominant interests quite often seek to protect themselves by sponsoring sympathetic organizations and parties with broad appeal. Many voluntary associations rely on private (though, again, often tax-supported) funding from a relatively small number of wealthy patrons. A simple measure of participation in civil society, then, is not sufficient to gauge the compensatory potential of collective organization. What is decisive is that relatively autonomous organizations protect otherwise disadvantaged interests. The importance of autonomous collective organization in parties and politically relevant voluntary associations for leveling political inequality can hardly be exaggerated. If the economic and political power of concentrated wealth, the cultural hegemony of a limited set of elites, and the decision-making power of an imperfectly controlled state apparatus are the most important factors underlying political inequal-

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ity, strong and autonomous organization of subordinate interests is the most important counterbalancing factor. It offers political competition to the influence of wealth and high status and limits the relative autonomy of the state vis-`a-vis subordinate interests. It gives subordinate groups some protection against hegemonic influence by offering alternative views and orientations. And it can strengthen the uniThe importance of versalistic norms of academic social and autonomous collecpolitical analysis as well as of news reporttive organization in ing by sponsoring research informed by the parties and politiconcerns and interests of subordinate cally relevant volun- groups. Among the conditions favoring or hintary associations for dering the development of such forms of leveling political inequality can hardly collective organization are mutually reinforcing processes in the political sphere. be exaggerated. Generally, the prospect of political success stimulates political participation while its absence stifles it; this seems to be a major reason why in many countries politically oriented participation is more prevalent among the middle classes than the working class or the dependent poor.10 Gaining or losing political influence on decisions about legislation and implementation can in turn favor or hinder collective organization. Thus, it seems reasonable to argue that the growing influence of environmental concerns in many Western countries has had a positive feedback on their green parties. It is well known that the long dominance of the Social Democrats in Swedish politics is one reason for the extraordinary strength of labor unions in Sweden. And the strength of public-employee unions in different U.S. states is partly explained by how much state politics favors or discourages unionization, while unionization of workers and employees in private industry has declined since 1960 due to structural changes in employment as well as adverse national political developments. In countries whose institutional setting has been shaped by strong unions, strong parties of the left, and significant participation of these parties in government, class and status differences in social and political participation are much reduced or eliminated. This claim has empirical support, and on simple reflection it makes good theoretical sense. It is no real surprise that the sustained impact of successful selforganization of subordinate interests and of the representation of these interests in the governance of societies diminishes the social, economic, and cultural factors maintaining political inequality and leads to a leveling in the social and political participation of different socioeconomic strata. By contrast, the disappointing performance of recently democratized political systems in Latin America seems largely

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due to a renewed weakness in the organized representation of subordinate interests. These interactions between collective organization and political success can create stable paths of advance or decline of equality in a political system, once critical turning points are passed. Therefore, the chances of a political self-organization of subordinate interests and its potential effects on political equality may well be dependent on historical conditions that are not easily changed.

Comparing Inequalities: Indicators and Metrics

To compare political inequality internationally is difficult since the weight of its different manifestations and determinants varies across countries and historical periods. However, some measures may yield a first approximation. A crude picture emerges from participation rates in politics and in politically relevant associations, broken down by class, race or ethnicity, and gender. This can be complemented by qualitative information on the strength, autonomy, and effectiveness of organizations devoted to advancing the interests of subordinate groups. Another avenue of assessment is to look for results. The incidence of poverty and of social exclusion as well as of decidedly substandard education can be gauges of political inequality. The follows from the assumption that the economic and knowledge resources required for meaningful participation in society are almost universally valued and that their absence indicates a drastically unequal political position of the groups so disadvantaged, at least if we focus on the long run. Both kinds of indicators will gain in credibility if they are embedded in an analysis of the main conditions and policies that, according to the best estimates, enhance or undercut political equality. I have offered a number of such estimates in this essay, though these may have to be adapted to different kinds of conditions by looking separately, for instance, at rich and well-established democracies, newly established ones in poorer countries, and countries in the early phases of democratization. Democratic equality is a critical dimension of the quality of any system of democratic rule. It stands in tension with the structure of social, economic, and cultural inequality. Even democracy as minimally conceived is only possible if political decisions are to some extent separated from the system of class, status, and power. But since structured inequality can never be entirely eradicated and political decision making can never be fully emancipated from the inequality in power resources, democratic equality is a goal that can only be approximated at a considerable distance. At the same time, democratic equality is a value that is not just ceremonially acknowledged but that is grounded in many practices and commitments common in modern societies. The principle of an equal vote is only one but not the least among these.

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The tension between democratic equality and the impact of differential economic, cultural, and social power is not a constant across modern democracies. There exists a great deal of variation, which ranges from democracies that remain extremely shallow in their egalitarian substance to realistic, if still limited approximations to democratic equality that are built on a significant empowerment of socially, economically, and culturally subordinate groups. Even formal democracy is more than what its critics denigrate, because it is an opening for greater democratic equality. To deepen democracy in the direction of greater political equality requires systematic and strong policies promoting social and economic equality. The quality of democracy, then, depends on social democracy, on longsustained policies of social protection and solidarity. NOTES
The author wishes to thank Miguel Glatzer, Patrick Heller, Charlie Kurzman, and Jim Mahoney for helpful comments on an earlier draft. This article has benefited from the discussion at the Stanford University conference on the quality of democracy and from continuing conversations with Ed Broadbent, member of the Canadian Parliament. 1. Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 1. 2. See Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne H. Stephens, and John D. Stephens, Capitalist Development and Democracy (Cambridge: Polity, 1992); as well as Evelyne Huber, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and John D. Stephens, The Paradoxes of Contemporary Democracy: Formal, Participatory, and Social Dimensions, Comparative Politics 29 (April 1997): 32342; and Gerard Alexander, The Sources of Democratic Consolidation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2002). 3. This is of course itself a major limitation of political equality. On electoral control under modern-day big government, see Paul Pierson, The Prospects of Democratic Control in an Age of Big Government, in Arthur M. Meltzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, eds., Politics at the Turn of the Century (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 14061. 4. The conception of cultural hegemony just sketched does not presuppose the idea of false consciousness. Rather than claiming superior knowledge of peoples objective interests, it merely argues that elite views and interests tend to shape the views and preferences of subordinate groups more than vice versa. 5. Terry Lynn Karl, Economic Inequality and Democratic Instability, Journal of Democracy 11 (January 2000): 14956. See also the comments in the introduction to Larry Diamond, Jonathan Hartlyn, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Lipset, Democracy in Developing Countries: Latin America, 2 nd ed. (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 4853. Evelyne Huber, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and John D. Stephens see recent developments of formal democracy in Latin America as stunted by the persistence of drastically unequal class power; see their Paradoxes of Contemporary Democracy. 6. See Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firm, Organizations, and States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970).

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7. On the effect of electoral systems, see Pippa Norris, Women: Representation and Electoral Systems, in Richard Rose, ed., The International Encyclopedia of Elections (Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly, 2000): 34851; Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Cultural Barriers to Womens Leadership: A Worldwide Comparison, paper presented at the 2000 Congress of the International Political Science Association in Quebec City, Canada, on 15 August 2000, offers extensive cross-national evidence; the situation in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism is the subject of Richard E. Matland and Kathleen A. Montgomery, eds., Womens Access to Political Power in Post-Communist Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 8. Paul Pierson, The Prospects of Democratic Control, emphasizes issues of information and cognitive capacity of the electorate in his review of the chances of democratic control of big government. Recognizing that simple techniques such as taking ones cue from trusted others and the collective superiority of aggregates of people who are individually only moderately informed curb the impact of ignorance and lack of judgment on the part of most voters, he remains skeptical that these mechanisms are sufficient to ensure electoral control of government based on at least rough equality. 9. See Talcott Parsons, The Kinship System of the Contemporary United States, American Anthropologist 45 (March 1943): 96114; and Talcott Parsons with Robert F. Bales, James Olds, Morris Zelditch, and Philip E. Slater, Family, Socialization, and Interaction Process (New York: Free Press, 1955). See also Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1963). For a study of dualcareer marriages of professionals in three countries, see Marilyn Rueschemeyer, Professional Work and Marriage: An East-West Comparison (London: Macmillan, 1981). 10. See for instance Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Marilyn Rueschemeyer, and Bjrn Wittrock, Conclusion: Contrasting Patterns of Participation and Democracy, in Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Marilyn Rueschemeyer, and Bjrn Wittrock, eds., Participation and Democracy East and West: Comparisons and Interpretations (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1998): 26684.