WP2:
Democracy
and Economic Inequality
WP2 asks whether the enormous increase of economic inequality in the last forty years may contribute to explain the current crisis of liberal democracies.
The emergence of new forms of populism, authoritarianism, and widespread disaffection with representative democracy can hardly be described and explained without considering the growth of economic inequality over the last 30 years. Many (Gilens and Page, 2017; Piketty 2014, 2020) envision a slide toward oligarchy due to the extreme concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, resulting in a loss of decision-making power over socio-economic and political processes by the middle class and, in particular by the least advantaged citizens. The critical slogan of Occupy Wall Street "one dollar, one vote" is unfortunately even truer now than a decade ago.
Scholars have approached the problem in three main different manners and the project intends to assess the limitations and strengths of each of them.
(a) Democracy as a Mere Tool for Realizing Justice
Faced with the apparent inability of democracy to produce just outcomes, some have been inclined to deny the intrinsic value of democracy, questioning the relationship between justice and democracy. The latter is considered only instrumental to the realization of the former, not an essential part of it. (Van Parijs 1996; Estlund 2008, Caranti 2023). The assessment of this position will take into account the complex relation between procedural and substantive conceptions of justice (Forst 2024).
(b) Populism and Radical Democracy:
A Challenge to Pre-Deliberative Principles of Justice
Alternatively, and almost in the opposite direction, justice loses its normative orientation, making room for radical and antagonistic forms of democracy not mitigated by pre-deliberative liberal principles of justice (Crouch 2004; Laclau 2005; Marchart 2007; Mouffe, 2018, Mudde 2011, 2017). We intend to provide a multidimensional analysis of the new forms of populism to understand the exten to which a liberal-democratic conception of justice could accommodate radical democracy elements.
(c) Redefining Democratic Power in the New Gilded Age: Limiting Wealth Inequality, Deliberative Democracy
and Pre-distributive Social Schemes
In recent years, there have been interesting developments in democratic theory that make a political system’s capacity to deliver certain substantive results, in particular a containment of economic inequality, a prerequisite for the fairness of democratic procedure; a too-large gap between rich and poor citizens is not treated from the perspective of mal-distribution but primarily as a matter of power inequality and political and economic domination (Shapiro 2016; Forst 2017; Allen 2023; Vrousalis 2023). In this vein, we intend to assess some recent theoretical proposals that support capping extreme wealth (Robeyns 2017) or economic inequality (Alì and Caranti 2021; Alì 2022; Malleson 2023). Our investigation goes further by focusing on the limits of grounding representative democracy in electoral competitions. A deliberative perspective (Lafont 2020; Landemore 2020) and some novel defences of pre-distributive social schemes capable of systematically preventing money-driven political inequalities (Thomas 2017; Edmundson 2017; Piketty 2020) will be the main object of investigation.