Inequality is a major factor in eroding democracy

Thomas B. Edsall, Democrats Delivered Millions to Texarkana. It Didn’t Matter One Bit. NYTimes, Aug. 12, 2025.

The article is generally about why the Democrats and in trouble and bumbling around. The title refers to the fact that Biden delivered pork for Texarkana and it did nothing for the Democrats in the 2024 election. That's how the article opens. Then Edsall gets around to a general enumeration of the Democrats' problems. Inequality isn't the only one, but it's the one that interests me at the moment:

Let’s start with Susan Stokes, a political scientist at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Center on Democracy. She wrote by email that inequality

is harmful, politically, but not because it undermines liberal values. A sense of being left behind in a society where many people are fabulously wealthy and others have comforts and opportunities that one lacks does fuel a loss of confidence in institutions.

Income inequality can also encourage partisan polarization. Let me stress that inequality has these effects directly but they are amplified by the rhetoric of ambitious politicians who find it easier to stoke distrust and mutual hatred among the public when there are big gaps between the wealthy and even the affluent, and the rest.

In a December 2024 article, “Income Inequality and the Erosion of Democracy in the 21st Century,” Stokes and Eli G. Rau, a political scientist at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico, conducted a cross-national survey that showed:

Income inequality is a strong and highly robust predictor of democratic erosion. This basic result is stunningly robust. In all, we find a consistent, positive association between income or wealth gaps and democratic erosion across more than 100 distinct statistical models.

Other factors are covered in the rest of the article.