Introduction

In recent years, the public debate on social and political inequality in relation to ethnicity, gender, age, income and education returned in all its intensity, both within and outside the Netherlands. Take the Occupy protests against the yawning wealth gap between the rich and the poor in the Western world and the great success of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, in which the French economist describes how patterns of inequality and concentration of wealth have developed over the last two centuries. Education is also gaining visibility as a social and political cleavage. For example, Mark Bovens and Anchrit Wille, in their book Diplomademocratie [Diploma Democracy], focused attention on the almost complete absence of people with a secondary education or less from politics and civil society. Or consider the rise of political parties such as Denk [Think] and Artikel 1, which are committed to the interests of the ‘new Dutch’, or the Black Lives Matter movement, which has put police violence against Black Americans on the agenda. The inequality between men and women is regularly in the news, too, whether it is about expressions of sexism, sexual violence against women, or the male-female ratio in politics.

Social inequality is the subject of research in political science, in at least two ways. First, social inequalities lead to a lot of political conflict and political struggle. Some people and social groups have more economic, social or cultural resources than others, and they therefore have many more opportunities in their lives than others. For these and other reasons, social inequality is an ‘inexhaustible breeding ground’ for potential conflicts of interest and conflicts (Bader 1991: 87). Second, political scientists are interested in the relationship between social inequality and inequality in terms of politics and power. Certain people and social groups have more opportunities than others to have their wishes and interests prevail and to turn collectively binding decisions to their favour. This inequality in terms of power is not self-explanatory, and certainly not in democratic political systems in which the interests and needs of all citizens have equal weight and all citizens have an equal voice, on paper at least. (Dahl 1998, 2006).