LIST OF PANELS

Can research on inequality and public policy processes be brought into dialogue? In recent decades, there have been growing concerns about inequality as a global phenomenon. Income and wealth inequalities are on the rise, universal access to basic goods and services has not been achieved, and the precarization of the labour force is permeating most societies. Moreover, the gap between men and women is widening and different types of inequalities reflecting class, gender, sex, race and ethnicity seem to be pervasive.

Existing studies on inequality draw mainly on economic and sociological perspectives. To date, public policy scholarship has not systematically addressed inequality, even though policy processes can produce, reproduce, worsen and/or ameliorate socio-economic inequalities. While we have some evidence of the effects of specific policy initiatives on inequality, there is very little literature on how the policy making process itself is shaped by and shapes patterns of inequality.

As Thomas Piketty notes in his seminal work Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the history of inequality is shaped by the joint collective choices of economic, social, and political actors in societies. In this sense, public policy perspectives should provide analytical tools to broaden our understanding of the causes and consequences of this global phenomenon. We suggest that policy concepts such as frames, agendas, discourses, coalitions and streams can inform and be informed by research into socio-economic inequalities. To generate dialogue between policy and inequality research, this workshop brings together scholars working at the interface between policy making and inequality and addresses two questions: How do policy processes shape inequality, and how do inequalities shape policy processes? The outcome will be a clearer understanding of the factors that shape policy making in an unequal world, and the institutional drivers of contemporary inequality.

This workshop brings together scholars undertaking research on inequality and public policy processes in both the North and Global South. We invite researchers interested in the relationship between public policy processes and social inequalities to submit papers addressing the following questions: How do social inequalities shape policy processes? How do policy processes shape inequality?

Our workshop seeks to generate dialogue between policy and inequality research. We start from the observation that research that links public policy and inequality is scarce. Existing studies on inequality draw mainly on sociological and economic perspectives that help us understand the multidimensional and complex dynamics of inequality, which vary according to regions and jurisdictions, and across societal groups. Piketty (2014) and Stiglitz (2015) claim that analyses of inequality should take into consideration the politics behind it. Hacker and Pierson (2010) claim that most studies that interconnect policy and inequality research fail to provide convincing analysis about the outcomes of inequality in relation with the political and policy processes related to those outcomes.

We encourage authors to investigate how the characteristics of policy processes shape distributional outcomes. Do participatory, inclusive and localised policy processes reduce or exacerbate inequalities of outcomes, relative to centralised, top-down, rationalistic modes of policy making? Furthermore, we hope to identify how concepts from the public policy literature, including actors, agendas, coalitions and/or streams, can be viewed through the lens of inequality, and how the operation of these policy process variables is affected by socio-economic power differentials. Finally, we want participants to explore how policy processes interact with inequalities and the extent to which these dynamic interactions help to explain trends in inequality. The outcome will be a clearer understanding of the factors that shape policy making in an unequal world, and the institutional drivers of contemporary inequality.