The POLAR project has aimed to examine the role of rising economic inequality for social mobility, social cohesion, and support for democracy in affluent Western societies. To that end, the project has been assembling a newly harmonized and cross-nationally comparative database from existing international and national household surveys, and has been merging the survey microdata with aggregate data on changing income distributions as well as other macroeconomic and contextual indicators. To date, the POLAR database is spanning data from well over five million individual respondents that have been surveyed in more than 100 countries between 1980 and 2020, and this database will continue to be updated and expanded in the future.
During its lifetime, POLAR researchers have been using this database to examine the role of rising inequality for citizens’ trust in fellow citizens, for their trust in the institutions of liberal democracy, for citizens’ support for authoritarian leadership, for intergenerational social reproduction and equality of opportunity, for citizens’ perceptions of fairness, meritocracy, and group conflict in society, for the stratification of marriage markets, and for citizens’ preferences over public redistribution and their voting behaviour. For almost all of these fundamentals of liberal democratic societies, we find adverse effects of rising inequality in our empirical data. This is an important finding insofar as our research has deliberately evaluated the implications of changing inequality within countries, which is much more strongly indicative of a genuinely causal role of economic inequality than when similar inferences have been reached from comparisons of more or less equal countries at the same point in time. That being said, our research also suggests important nuances to this main finding: for example, in contrast to some widely-publicized claims, equality tends not to be “better for everyone”, but often better for the less privileged members of society. Likewise, adverse effects of rising inequality are not inevitably uniform across countries, but may in some cases be empirically mitigated by effective public safety nets, especially so with respect to avoiding adverse political consequences of high inequality. Outside of the political realm, however, it often turns out to be the case that sustaining economic growth appears as the more effective political strategy to sustain the fabric of liberal societies than focusing more narrowly on combatting inequality. Beyond its substantive research, the POLAR project has also contributed methodological innovations, as e.g. regards the measurement of income inequality, the harmonization of income data across different household surveys, and the development of a new statistical model for analysing ordinal data from different source questionnaires.
To date, this whole body of POLAR research has been used in about 75 research presentations, and has already yielded several article publications in highly-respected international academic journals. The project team continues to disseminate its research findings through academic presentations, through the dissemination of methodological contributions and further international article publications as well as through a book manuscript that is under preparation by the P.I. to detail the project’s substantive findings in a more overarching manner. During and beyond its lifetime, the project is hosting its website polar-project.org to post working paper publications and to inform the interested public about its research and any new research outputs.
