Rising inequality is a political challenge to many developed countries. And parties of the broad left regularly promise to reduce it. But when they are in power, nothing much seems to change. This feeds a growing disillusion, and anger, and we see the rise of populist parties of the right, who argue that the whole system is rigged. Recent research, by political scientists at Cambridge, has examined this across twelve developed countries. And they offer an explanation, and a challenge.
One might expect that if a party strongly emphasises equality in its election campaign, it is likely to implement more equalising policies once in office. Research published in the British Journal of Political Science finds that this “naïve mandate theory” does not describe what really happens when parties are in power.
The research
The authors, Alexander Horn and Leo Ahrens, compared what parties say about equality and what they then do in office, using 850,000 individual statements from party manifestos in twelve OECD countries between 1970 and 2020. They considered explicit references to economic equality and redistribution, rather than vague slogans like “for the many, not the few.” They then compared these manifesto positions with policy outcomes, looking at three kinds of policy which might reduce inequality.
Although there is evidence that left‑leaning parties are rather more likely to deliver egalitarian policies, they found that the emphasis has varied widely over time. For example, during the Third Way era of the 1990s, social democratic parties in government toned down equality, or presented it in terms of ‘trickle down’. As Peter Mandelson said, “We should be intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes.” Inequality only returned as a prominent theme after the 2008 financial crisis.
Selective egalitarianism
Horn and Ahrens describe what they found as “selective egalitarianism”, with parties choosing some equality policies and avoiding others. Especially when parties face electoral risks, they choose policies whose costs are spread widely and whose effects are easy for voters to understand. And they avoid policies that impose concentrated, visible costs on a small, powerful group such as the highest‑income taxpayers.
They looked at three kinds of policy:
- Pre‑distribution: shaping incomes before tax, especially via minimum wages
- Social insurance: buffering income loss through benefits such as unemployment pay
- Progressive taxation: taxing high incomes and wealth at higher rates
Although all three can reduce inequality, they impact rich and poor differently, and carry different political risks. What they found was that even governments rhetorically committed to equality, mostly choose the first two and avoid the third.
They suggest two explanations. Firstly, policies that impose big, focused losses on a small group tend to provoke strong resistance and are seen as electorally dangerous. This is the case with taxation of people on high incomes. This policy hits a clearly defined group of affluent, politically engaged voters who are likely to organise and retaliate. By contrast, minimum wage rises and more generous unemployment benefits are more diffuse, with the costs spread across firms, consumers and taxpayers, making them less politically explosive.
Secondly, because tax systems are complex and hard to understand, voters are less likely to give credit for progressive tax reforms. And that makes it easy for opponents to frame such reforms as unfair or economically harmful. In interviews, politicians worried that misleading arguments (for example, confusing marginal and average tax rates) could easily gain traction. This trap is evident in the Starmer government’s decision to withdraw an inheritance tax concession from farmers. The arithmetic was complicated, but opposition to the “Family Farm Tax” was easy to mobilise, losing the government a lot of credibility.
So, taxing the rich is a riskier policy. It focuses vocal opposition, and confuses voters. It is much easier to understand minimum wage and benefit policies, which offer clear, tangible gains to beneficiaries with less concentrated losses and simpler narratives.
Offending your supporters
A further factor is the composition of a party’s electorate. Where support for left-leaning parties came from relatively prosperous and well educated people, parties seemed less inclined to adopt any of these policies, because their core supporters benefit less from these measures and may care more about their own tax bills, despite manifesto claims.
Thus, the effect of an egalitarian platform is “conditional”: it is stronger when a party’s voters are poorer and less educated. Equality rhetoric becomes highly selective, tailored to the material interests of the party’s base.
What really happens?
Horn and Ahrens find that an emphasis on economic equality in their manifestos, does translate into some policy change. Governments with stronger egalitarian rhetoric are more likely to raise minimum wages and improve unemployment benefits than their less egalitarian counterparts.
But the same is not true for tax policy. There was no consistent link between egalitarian positions and higher taxes on the rich. Governments that talk most about equality are no more likely than others to use top‑end taxation.
Moreover, even where egalitarian parties do expand minimum wage or welfare policies, the effect is often to protect the middle classes and low‑paid workers without significantly reducing the income or wealth of the very rich.
Conclusion
The authors summarise the picture as equality‑oriented governments “insuring the middle, buffering the poor, but sparing the rich”.
The paper concludes that the gap between the demand for redistribution and the modest policies actually implemented is not mainly due to voter hostility or economic impossibility. Instead, it reflects the way parties perceive electoral risks, and choose instruments that minimise backlash from affluent voters and business interests. Parties may promise equality but then cherry pick the least risky instruments when governing. This explains why rising top‑end inequality has persisted even under ostensibly egalitarian governments in many countries.
If parties really want to close the gap between egalitarian rhetoric and real redistribution, they will have to confront both the political fear of concentrated losses for the rich and the communication challenge of complex tax reforms. In October, the budget will give us a signal of whether the Burnham government is going to buck the trend.
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