Whilst the politics of rising inequality have recently become the focus of scholarly attention in the United States, comparatively little research has been published on the subject in Western Europe, even though a similar trend towards a more unequal income distribution can be observed across the continent. This panel presents papers from a project that addresses this gap, by using Hacker and Pierson's theory of 'winner-take-all' politics to interpret the causes and consequences of rising inequality in the advanced welfare states of Western Europe. These papers provide us with important insights into the politics of inequality in countries where redistribution and social protection have a much more robust tradition than in the United States. The project also subjects the 'winner-take-all' argument to comparative scrutiny, making it possible to identify the extent to which the politics of inequality in the US represents a broader trend amongst advanced democracies, rather than an idiosyncratic manifestation of American exceptionalism, and testing out some of the causal mechanisms postulated by Hacker and Pierson.