Across Europe and the UK, recent political upheavals – from the rise of populist-nationalist parties to backlash against progressive social policies – are often attributed to growing economic inequality. Yet a crucial part of the story may be missing: backlash may stem not only from rising inequality, but also from rising equality – specifically, from the perception that previously disadvantaged groups are gaining ground relative to traditionally dominant ones.
This project seeks to reconceptualise and operationalise another way to measure and understand inequality's social impacts. By moving beyond anonymous, aggregate indicators, our interdisciplinary collaboration will develop new frameworks that capture the group-based, trajectory-sensitive dynamics underlying hypothesised anti-egalitarian sentiment. This approach promises to explain phenomena that conventional inequality research cannot adequately address.
The project is co-created by AFSEE Senior Fellows from the Ariadne network (European Funders for Social Change and Human Rights), ActNow (Northern Ireland), and the Sigrid Rausing Trust, and academics from the LSE III's Perceptions of Inequality research programme, and is designed to generate directly actionable insights for civil society organisations and grant-making bodies confronting anti-egalitarian backlash. Our aim is not only to explain polarisation and backlash but to identify pathways toward reconciliation – that is, strategies for advancing equality in ways that are broadly perceived as fair and do not trigger the defensive reactions that undermine progressive change.