The equality positions and policies of governments, 1970-2020: How egalitarian parties evoke equality while evading real redistribution

Inequality remains a defining challenge for advanced democracies. Yet governments often fail to enact redistributive policies despite public demands and – equally disconcerting from the vantage point of a representative democracy – parties’ egalitarian rhetoric. Understanding this gap between economic equality rhetoric and actual policy is critical to advancing scholarship on the politics of inequality. In this paper, we thus ask: How do parties’ campaign commitments to economic equality relate to their actual equality policies across 12 advanced democracies and if and how this relates to changing voter profiles of parties? Distinguishing predistribution, fiscal redistribution, and welfare policies we demonstrate that parties tend to pursue the least politically costly policies once in office.
We focus on the puzzle of why even egalitarian parties frequently avoid implementing substantive redistribution, despite previous rhetorical commitments to equality in party programs. Political observers may easily list high-profile instances with the potential to undermine trust in politicians. We show that such a policy gap in fact exists for vague and specific equality positions. This does not mean that equality policies are per se avoided. Rather, less risky pathways such as welfare policies provide a field of activity for parties that avoid taxing the rich. This matters because the policies with the greatest leveling potential are, as we show, the ones most likely to be evaded.
What then helps to understand the lack of translation into policy? Building on research on electoral realignment and programmatic supply, as well as studies of how parties assess the risks of equality policies, we argue that selective egalitarianism explains this disconnect. Parties rhetorically endorse equality but, once in office, avoid fiscally risky policies—especially top-end taxation—preferring welfare and predistributive measures that reduce the risk of backlash from influential groups facing concentrated costs. We further expect that government parties – even where they translate position into equality policy – are less likely to do so as parties’ voters become wealthier or more educated.
We test these expectations by combining a dataset crowd-coded from over 850,000 manifesto texts in 12 countries, alongside comprehensive data on group appeals, voter profiles for each party at each election, and government policies. Using (wild-cluster-bootstrap) regressions, we show that even egalitarian parties help the poor and the middle class, but spare the rich. Compounding this, richer or more educated voters further constrain parties even for the less redistributive/leveling policy choices. Results hold for various specifications, country samples and policy-proxy measures.