Politicizing Inequality: The Power of Ideas

Katya Gonzalez-Willette Hello and welcome to the Building State Capability Program, Harvard University’s podcast series. A contemporary challenge is inequality, which is reinforced when it’s taken for granted. But it can be disrupted when marginalized people gain self-esteem, challenged hitherto unquestioned inequalities, and gain confidence in the possibility of social change. These ideas are illustrated with ethnographic research from Latin America, where income inequality has recently declined. By highlighting some ways in which ideas matter, Dr. Alice Evans Paper on Politicizing Inequality, The Power of Ideas, seeks to persuade political economists to go beyond incentives. She suggests that future efforts to tackle inequality might harness the power of ideas, tackling norms, perceptions, beliefs about what others think and do. Publicizing positive deviance and strengthening social movements. On today’s BSC podcast, Katya Gonzalez-Willette, an Event and Outreach Specialist at the Growth Lab at CID, interviews Alice Evans, Associate at the Building State Capability Program and lecturer at King’s College in London, who provides further insight on why ideas matter for curbing inequality and how social mobilization can catalyze greater government commitment to socially inclusive economic growth.

Katya Gonzalez-Willette Thank you, Alice, for being with us today and for your talk at CID. So you are a lecturer at King’s College London, and also an associate with the Building State Capability Program here at CID. Can you tell us a little bit more about your role with BSC?

Alice Evans So Matt Andrews and others have been working to support governments to build their state capabilities by helping governments identify problems collectively resolve them. Testing, try working out new things. And that has delivered phenomenal results when the government perceives and prioritizes something is a problem. But we also know from across the world that governments don’t care about everything, and there may be some issues that are neglected. So growth, FDI exports may be key, but other issues like workers rights may not be prioritized by government. So that’s got me here to be difficult and to try to think about how we work with governments to help them resolve these knotty, troublesome issues. Yeah, so I’m here to cause trouble.

Katya Gonzalez-Willette Great. We’re happy to have you here at CID. And your talk today was focused on your research paper titled Politicizing Inequality, The Power of Ideas. So can you tell me a little bit more about what motivated you to do this research?

Alice Evans Right. So with all my research, I tried to look for the drivers of positive change over the long term. You know, social change doesn’t just happen in a short term project over a couple of years. But I wanted to learn from progress, to learn from history. So I’m interested in income inequality. And where is one place in the world where income inequality has fallen and where we can learn from? That’s Latin America. Income inequality reduced over the 2000s. So I thought, right, let’s try and find out why that happened.

Katya Gonzalez-Willette So how would you explain the decline of income inequality in Latin America throughout the 2000s? What were some of the key drivers that you found to your research?

Alice Evans So on the one hand, we can look at the fall in labor income inequality, so people at the bottom started earning more. That was partly due to increased education, increased demand for low skilled work in the context of the commodity boom, and also more redistribution. Spending. government, spending on health, raising the minimum wage and investing in social protection. I think we were asked, why did governments do this? Why did they increasingly share the proceeds of growth? Because in sub-Saharan Africa, for example, where there was also a commodity boom actually in those countries and those mineral rich countries, income inequality actually increased. So we need to understand the politics of this. Why did governments want to redistribute more in the 2000s? So to understand this, what I wanted to do is try to connect the micro and the macro to learn from people’s reasons for acting, to draw on concepts from social psychology, to learn from anthropologists in Latin America, to understand why people rebel and prioritize various different things, then connect that to what we know from economics and political science about big macro trends. I consider three hypotheses. One is that you see increased fiscal space over the 2000s with commodity boom, improved terms of trade, improved tax to GDP ratio, more ODA coming in. So fiscal space is certainly a necessary condition because enabled governments to spend more on the left. But it still doesn’t explain why they chose to redistribute that fiscal surplus. I thought maybe it’s about democratization, freedom of association, freedom of assembly reduces the opportunity cost of leftist organizing. You know, in the 1980s under military dictatorships, authoritarian regimes. If you were a trade union organizer, you need to be arrested, beaten, abused, incarcerated. So that’s a strong disincentive. Or maybe poorer people would vote for leftist parties. Maybe that in a context of income inequality, the poorest would vote for parties that promised to favor their interests. Maybe that in a context of democratization. Countries with large indigenous populations would see strong indigenous political parties. But none of that really happened. You know, a similar in others find no robust evidence that democratization reduces income inequality. Tenorio finds that democratization does not necessarily increase social spending. We also know that Latin American countries with large indigenous populations like Guatemala, Peru, do not have strong, successful indigenous parties. Latino Barometer data tells us that the poorest do not necessarily vote for the left. So democracy doesn’t seem to catalyze redistribution. But here’s the weird thing. Huber and Stephens, they look at the lagged effects of democratization and they find that over a 20 year period in Latin America, it does have some effect. There is something going on. It maybe enables something else. And I think that could be social movements. So we know from the quantitative data that economic liberalization over the 1980s and 1990s, wage cuts, job losses, subsidies, cuts that stimulated a wave of collective activities as people fought to protect what they had previously got. And through seeing that mobilization that shifted people’s beliefs that indigenous groups, through coming together, celebrating their identities, through fiestas, through parade, through collectively analyzing their problems, through marching and seeing thousands of people on the march that galvanized hope. They thought that they realized that social change was possible. They realized their strength in numbers and similarly so for strikes, for protest, for neighborhood associations, for domestic workers, this process of coming together, collectively rebelling, seeing their strength in numbers, and most importantly, not just mobilization, but incrementally securing gains from government and then perceiving the government is responsive. So, for example, after the constitutional meeting processes in various countries in Colombia and Venezuela, indigenous groups were elected to constituent assemblies. So they then perceived the government as more responsive. Brazil had a remarkably socially inclusive constitution making process, and that shifted people’s expectations of governments. So the key thing here is that people are more likely to mobilize, to push for accountability when they perceive the government as capable, as responsive, as nonviolent. So the really tricky challenge is how do you get into that positive feedback loop where people shift their expectations of government and then stop making demands? Because the other situation, which could be a sort of part dependent negative feedback loop, is where people are despondent. They don’t think that the government will respond nicely, kindly or nonviolently, so they don’t make demands. But if no one’s making demands, then the government has no strong incentive. Exactly right. So how do we get out of that bad equilibrium to the positive feedback loop? That’s what I was interested in.

Katya Gonzalez-Willette That’s great. Thank you. So you studied Latin America as a region and may have noticed a sort of domino effect where people would see victories in other countries near them. People in Bolivia would see a victory in Colombia and be empowered to go and try to promote social change. Can you talk a little bit more about that and what the implications could be for other regions like Africa, Asia, who may struggle with similar issues?

Alice Evans Yeah, this diffusion effect was really powerful and Van Cortes and Rice have showed that when an indigenous parties gained power in Ecuador and Bolivia, then others became emboldened and likewise organized. Or when people saw leftists, when people saw leftists in Brazil, in Argentina, Venezuela not only regained political power through being reelected, but also maintained economic stability that reinforced the perceived viability of the left. So people thought that leftist governments could do it to maintain macroeconomic stability. And so I think that is why we see this strong regional trend across Latin America, particularly in the commodity boom areas, because they were inspired by the others. And this is a really key point to so much of my research that social change accelerates when we see that others are changing. Right? And particularly when we see that our peers are changing because we shift our expectations about what is possible. You know, so often that we become resigned to the status quo. You know, we may become despondent. We think the change is impossible. But when we see people just like us winning these victories, then we come to shift our expectations. Whereas in subsaharan Africa, we don’t see those similar gains that may reinforce a sense of despondency. So I think you’re absolutely spot on.

Katya Gonzalez-Willette And the paper you mentioned a very interesting point, that inequality can also be reinforced through internalized stereotypes. So can you tell me a little bit more about the role of stereotypes in either enforcing or maybe even creating inequality?

Alice Evans Absolutely. So all stereotypes are assumptions about someone because they’re a member of a group, and these are gained through observations, through interactions. So they reflect our idiosyncratic experiences like you or my personal interactions. But these are reinforced by labor markets, politics and media structures. So, for example, in Latin America, where many of the big media conglomerates so closely aligned with neoliberal regimes, they may or the male newsreaders, but newsreaders are predominantly men, reinforcing and depicting indigenous groups as backward, as less knowledgeable, as savages. And so if people perceive indigenous people as less educated, that affects their interactions. So, for example, we know from the ethnographic research that elites in Santa Cruz pushed for autonomy, regional autonomy, because they didn’t want to share with the other. They saw indigenous people as not like them and they didn’t want to share. These stereotypes may also affect support for participatory governance. If we think other groups are less knowledgeable backward, then what can they contribute? So in Bolivia in 2004, even when they introduced the law of popular participation, the liberals assumed they knew best. The urban elites assumed they knew best and sort of dismissed Indigenous claims and contributions. So absolutely, these stereotypes affect how we interact with each other and can thereby reinforce inequalities.

Katya Gonzalez-Willette So last but not least, we hear that you’re writing a book. Can you tell us anything about that? Maybe a little spoiler? 

Alice Evans I am so excited about this. This is all about corporate accountability. So in going back to me, a tricky, troublesome problem with workers rights. So, for example, as of this year, in 2018, all large French companies are legally obliged to identify and reduce risks of human rights violations and environmental degradation in their supply chains. So if they buy from someone and that person has caused some big catastrophe, they can be taken to court. The buyer can be taken to court and sued. Wow. Yeah. I mean, this is totally groundbreaking. And you might think, well, that’s just France that, you know, anti-globalization, strong state regulation, but not so because this year in Switzerland, their national council has just voted in support of similar legislation. And just last week at the UN, it was the fourth session of the UN binding treaty on transnational corporations that human rights Ecuador and South Africa have been pushing for a UN binding treaty on this. So this book is all about the politics, the political drivers of corporate accountability and corporate accountability. The reason why it’s important is that we have what’s now a situation of what we call corporate impunity. If GAP, for example, will search for the lowest possible labor costs because it needs to remain price competitive on Elliott Street here in Cambridge. And it may disregard problems in its supply chains, it may disregard concerns about workers rights abuses. But if they were accountable for some of those abuses, they would have a strong incentive to really diligently, carefully check their supply chains and to reduce the risks of any kind of harms. Because at the moment, without that kind of liability, they just search for the lowest possible labor costs. And you know, which country is in the highest manufacturing rate this year by and companies, buyers are flocking to Myanmar because it’s cheap. You know, regardless of what we know about the genocide, gross human rights abuses. That’s where it’s cheap. And as long as you’re focusing only on the bottom line, not about the accountability for human rights abuses, that’s the kind of situation that we’ll end up with. So my book is all about how we can change that scenario.

Katya Gonzalez-Willette Very exciting. Well, thank you so much for being with us today, Alice. And we look forward to reading your book and future research.

Alice Evans Thank you Katya.

Katya Gonzalez-Willette If you want to learn more about the Building State Capability program, please visit bsc.cid.harvard.edu. Thank you for listening.