{"title":"Income Inequality and Political Nationalism","authors":"M. Mckenna","doi":"10.2139/ssrn.2994583","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This paper studies how the political elite uses nationalism as a tool for altering the preferences of the voting public. A model is designed to explain how a change in income inequality motivates political parties to use nationalism. The model concludes that increased income inequality incentivises political nationalism through increased voter polarization. An empirical analysis is undertaken using information from political party manifestos as a proxy for political nationalism. Results show that wealthy countries respond to increased income inequality by increasing their level of nationalist rhetoric. When a broader country set of poor countries is used, this relationship breaks down.","PeriodicalId":285469,"journal":{"name":"ERN: Institutions & Political Power in Transitional Economies (Topic)","volume":"73 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0000,"publicationDate":"2016-10-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"ERN: Institutions & Political Power in Transitional Economies (Topic)","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2994583","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"","JCRName":"","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
This paper studies how the political elite uses nationalism as a tool for altering the preferences of the voting public. A model is designed to explain how a change in income inequality motivates political parties to use nationalism. The model concludes that increased income inequality incentivises political nationalism through increased voter polarization. An empirical analysis is undertaken using information from political party manifestos as a proxy for political nationalism. Results show that wealthy countries respond to increased income inequality by increasing their level of nationalist rhetoric. When a broader country set of poor countries is used, this relationship breaks down.