Winner-take-all politics in Europe? European inequality in comparative perspective

In this introduction to the special issue on The New Politics of Inequality in Europe, we summarize recent literature on income inequality in the advanced democracies and argue that dominant accounts are too heavily focused on the United States, while the experience of western European countries has been neglected. While income inequality has risen nearly everywhere in the rich industrial democracies since the end of the 1970s, it has done so from different starting points, at different rates, and for reasons connected to different mechanisms and different parts of the distribution. Extending the analysis to Western Europe enables us to fully understand this variation.