IN THE EIGHT YEARS since the original publication of Unequal Democracy, the issue of inequality has moved to the forefront of American politics. When I wrote the book, I certainly did not foresee the epic financial crisis of 2008, the dramatic election of Barack Obama in the midst of that crisis, the extraordinary measures taken to rescue Wall Street and stem the Great Recession that followed, the political reactions on the left (with the rise and fall of the Occupy Wall Street movement) and right (with the rise of the Tea Party and the Republican takeovers of the House and Senate), or a close-fought presidential election pitting a polarizing incumbent who identified inequality as “the defining issue of our time” against a fabulously wealthy businessman with a controversial career in leveraged buyouts. My primary aim in revising the book has been to take due account of these momentous events, all of which seem to me to be highly relevant to the economic and political issues it addressed.
The past eight years have also seen a flourishing of research and writing on these issues. I have been informed and inspired by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson's Winner-Take-All Politics, Timothy Noah's The Great Divergence, Kay Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry Brady's The Unheavenly Chorus, Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality, Martin Gilens's Affluence and Influence, Hedrick Smith's Who Stole the American Dream?, Nicholas Carnes's White-Collar Government, Lane Kenworthy's Social Democratic America, and Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, among many other works. While I have not attempted to provide a comprehensive review of relevant literature, I have done my best to integrate what I have learned from the very welcome outpouring of books, articles, and working papers on the political economy of inequality.
It is common for revised editions of scholarly books to add a new chapter or “afterword” to an otherwise unaltered text. That is convenient for authors and publishers, but sometimes less helpful for readers. Given the profusion of political events, new scholarship, and new data relevant to the issues addressed here, I have felt it necessary to provide a much more extensive revision. As well as adding two entirely new chapters, I have made substantial changes in most of the existing chapters, incorporating new developments, revising tabulations and statistical analyses using the most recent available data, rethinking a few conclusions, and rephrasing many more. In order to prevent the book from becoming too unwieldy, I have also excised one whole chapter and many shorter passages that seemed tangential to the main lines of analysis. I thank Chuck Myers and Eric Crahan, my past and present editors at Princeton University Press, and Suzanne Nichols, director of publications at the Russell Sage Foundation, for being splendidly supportive of this effort.
Portions of the new material are based on articles, essays, and blog posts in which I have attempted to make sense of ongoing political developments. I am indebted to John Sides for providing me with a comfortable perch at The Monkey Cage blog, to Harvard University's Center for American Political Studies for recruiting me as a commentator on Theda Skocpol's 2011 Alexis de Tocqueville Lecture (subsequently published as Obama and America's Political Future), and to Sheldon Danziger for involving me in a conference and symposium on the Great Recession for The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.1 I am also grateful for opportunities to present the evolving argument of the book in lectures and keynote addresses at the University of Georgia, the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University, Lafayette College, Loyola University, Southern Illinois University, the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, the American Sociological Association, San Diego State University, American University, Diego Portales University, and the Southern Political Science Association.
In addition to expressing my continuing gratitude to all of the institutions and individuals who contributed to the making of the original book, I thank Vanderbilt University, Chancellor Nicholas Zeppos, John Geer, and my colleagues and students in Vanderbilt's Department of Political Science for providing a stimulating and extremely supportive scholarly environment in which to revise it. The resources associated with the May Werthan Shayne Chair of Public Policy and Social Science have been instrumental in facilitating my research. The staff of the Department of Political Science and the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions—Tina Bembry, Jayne Cornwell, Darlene Davidson, Natasha Duncan, and Shannon Meldon-Corney—have been unfailingly gracious and helpful.
Even by the saintly standards of spouses in prefaces, my wife Denise deserves extraordinary gratitude—not only for her unfailing daily love and support, but also for uprooting her life for the sake of my personal and professional well-being.
Connie Mercer and her colleagues at Homefront (http://www.homefrontnj.org) have provided an inspiring example of effective social action and a good home for the proceeds.
I have benefited from a great deal of constructive feedback on the original edition of Unequal Democracy from colleagues, students, and reviewers. Chris Achen, Kathy Cramer, Marty Gilens, Marc Hetherington, Ben Page, Wendy Rahn, Lynn Vavreck, and John Zaller have been compatriots, friendly critics, and critical friends. I am especially grateful to a distinguished group of colleagues who traveled to Nashville for a workshop critiquing the original edition and providing advice for revision: Cramer, Page, Zaller, Jared Bernstein, Hank Farber, Jennifer Hochschild, Gary Jacobson, Lane Kenworthy, Don Kinder, and Tim Smeeding. Although I have not adopted all of their good advice, I have adopted enough of it to make the book substantially better.
Finally, I am indebted both intellectually and personally to readers from beyond the walls of academia for their thoughts, questions, and encouragement. One of them, Daniel Wasik, has kindly consented to let me appropriate his words, providing a more eloquent conclusion to the book than any I could have written myself.
Nashville, Tennessee
February 2016
1 Bartels (2012; 2013b).