Does economic inequality reduce political system support? Local-level evidence from Denmark

Abstract Does economic inequality dampen support for the political system? This question has been answered in the affirmative in prior work studying the relationship between economic inequality and various manifestations of political system support across countries or US states. However, recent work challenges the premise underlying such analyses by showing that citizens are generally ignorant about national-level inequality. Relatedly, work on contextual effects finds that economic and social phenomena are particularly consequential for political attitudes when they reflect palpable everyday experiences. Combining these insights, we suggest that a more theoretically and methodologically appropriate test of the proposition that economic inequality reduces political system support should focus on local, neighbourhood-level economic inequality, which citizens encounter on a daily basis. By linking multiple geo-referenced surveys – both cross-sectional and longitudinal – with Danish registry data, we create micro-contextual measures of local economic inequality and relate them to a range of indicators of political system support. We find no evidence indicating that local inequality reduces political system support.