What Drives Unequal Policy Responsiveness? Assessing the Role of Informational Asymmetries in Economic Policy-Making

Abstract

Recent scholarship on inequality and political representation argues that economic elites are dominating democratic policy-making, yet it struggles to explain the underlying mechanisms. This article proposes that unequal responsiveness reflects asymmetries in information about fiscal policy across income classes, as opposed to being a structural bias inherent in capitalist democracy. I test the argument in a pathway case study of economic policy-making in Denmark, using a new data set that combines preference and spending data spanning 18 spending domains between 1985 and 2017. I find that governments that pursue standard macroeconomic policies coincidentally respond more strongly to the preferences of the affluent, owing to a closer adjustment of preferences to the state of the economy among citizens in upper income groups. These findings have important democratic and theoretical implications, as they suggest that unequal responsiveness may not reflect substantive misrepresentation of majority interests, but rather differences in information levels across groups.