Has the political left succeeded in its historical mission of reducing inequalities? According to empirical research by Vincenzo Emanuele and Federico Trastulli, the left has reduced several forms of inequality in Western Europe whilst in power over the past 150 years. But it has done so with ever-decreasing efficacy, failing to reduce inequalities at all for the past few decades.
According to several influential political thinkers and social scientists, the political left is defined by its historical mission of reducing inequalities. Yet – surprisingly – empirical tests of whether left parties in government have actually achieved this goal are often limited in scope, especially from a comparative and longitudinal perspective.
To date, most studies by international political economists and political sociologists have been restricted to analyses of whether the left in government impacts economic forms of inequality such as welfare and income equality, reporting mixed results. Some contributions have considered the left’s impact on political and social inequalities, but such studies often suffer from quite idiosyncratic spatial-temporal designs and (in our view) inaccurate measurements of left governmental power.
In this light, in our recent work we ask the following questions: have left parties in government actually reduced inequality? And has the impact of the left in power on the different forms of inequality changed over time?
Testing Left governments vis-à-vis seven different inequalities
To overcome the shortcomings of other contributions on this topic, we seek answers to these questions by empirically analysing 114 “left” parties across 20 Western European countries over 150 years, from the very first politicisation of the class cleavage to recent times (1871-2020).
In order to more accurately measure left governmental power, we revive a rarely employed instrument in Bartolini’s ‘Governmental Power Index’. This measure allows us to provide a historical account of left parties’ executive relevance – which, in line with our previous findings on social democracy, shows that after the “golden age” of the 1960s and 1970s, the left’s recent decline does not seem as severe in government as it looks electorally.
Key to our approach is adopting a multidimensional view of inequality. We distinguish between seven different forms of economic (income and welfare), social (education and health), and political inequalities (distribution of political power by social group, socioeconomic position, and gender). For each one, we identify measures that allow comparisons across place and time. These measures show that whilst historically there has been a long march towards comparatively high standards of equality in Western Europe – the most egalitarian region of the world in relative terms – only a few (social) forms of equality are close to their upper limit, indicating that there is still considerable room for improvement through policy, especially in the fields of income and political power by gender.
Has the Left in government historically reduced inequalities?
We begin by testing the hypothesis that the higher the power of the left, the lower the (political, social, and economic) inequalities.
Our results are shown in Figure 1. In line with our expectations, we find that the left in power has historically reduced most – but not all – forms of inequality. Indeed, this is the case for welfare inequality, educational and health inequality, and inequality in the distribution of political power by socioeconomic position and social group, but not for income inequality and inequality in the distribution of political power by gender.
Figure 1 – The effect of left governmental power on inequalities: 1871-2020
The other hypothesis we test surrounds whether or not the left’s ability to reduce inequalities has decreased over time.
As expected, we find that the equalising power of the left has gradually waned over time – to the point where it appears to have completely faded towards the end of the 20th century. This is shown in Figure 2 with respect to welfare universalism (for plots relating to other inequalities, see our full article). In fact, since the 1980s, the left in government has not made a significant difference in reducing any of the different forms of inequality, becoming indistinguishable from the centre-right – which, as per our statistical tests, never reduces inequality when in power (in line with its core mission).
Figure 2 – Marginal effect of left governmental power on Welfare universalism over time
Reflecting on left’s declining ability to reduce inequalities
To sum up: whilst, historically, the left accomplished its core mission of reducing inequalities, this has not been the case for the last four decades. Our findings carry important political implications for left parties across Western Europe, which seem to have lost sight of their defining purpose once they are in government and/or lost their ability to impact society through policy.
Ultimately, the reasons for this decline in the equalising power of the left remain to be explored. Preliminary data-based speculations do not point to the role of factors such as ceiling effects in levels of equality, decline in governmental power, or even changing voters’ preferences. Rather, we believe that left parties’ recent inability to reduce inequality may be a byproduct of the pressures put on governments’ policymaking by external constraints – from global financial markets to the institutional frameworks of the European Union.
Left parties’ recent inability to reduce inequality may be a byproduct of external constraints – from global financial markets to the institutional frameworks of the EU
Indeed, following well-known arguments, the room for manoeuvre of governments in in key policy areas such as welfare is limited both from the binding macroeconomic parameters and common monetary policy within the Eurozone and the pressures for competitiveness in liberalised financial markets. For instance, these constraints may prevent a national government from pursuing tax-and-spend approaches to fund social provisions or a debt-based expansionary policy to face an economic crisis, as these might both scare away foreign investments and violate binding EU commitments. Of course, this changed environment particularly affected parties on the left, which first emerged to transform society in a more egalitarian direction precisely through some of the instruments – public education and healthcare systems, universal welfare states, and so on – that are most impacted by these external constraints.
At any rate, we encourage future empirical research to test these alternative hypotheses and, hence, understand why the left seems to have become unable to reduce inequalities.
All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s). They do not represent the position of LSE Inequalities, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credits: Hyejin Kang via Shutterstock.
