Sunday, March 16, 2014
Diplomat (Omni Shoreham)
Ever since the early 1980s the United Kingdom has been an outlier in Western Europe for its high levels of income inequality. This inequality is all the more puzzling given the UK’s much more egalitarian politics between the 1940s and the 1970s. This paper draws on Hacker and Pierson’s conceptualization of politics as ‘organized combat’ to interpret this dramatic shift in the distribution of income. As in the United States, UK politics moved away from the post-war Keynesian settlement because conservative elites close to the finance sector successfully mobilized their political and material resources to exploit the increasingly divided labour movement and forge a new ideological consensus in British party politics. This consensus did not reflect any sea change in voter behaviour, which remained constantly supportive of the welfare state and economic interventionism, leading to a growing disconnect between political leaders and the electorate. The similarity of the political shift in the UK and the US suggests that formal institutions explain little about distributive politics and that policy change needs to be understood in terms of the ideas and resources mobilized by organized interests. What the US and the UK have in common is not their constitutional arrangements, which could hardly be more different, but a liberal ideological tradition and a politically mobilized financial sector.
