This dissertation consists of three essays that investigate various political consequences of economic inequality in democracies. While focusing on the manners in which political actors, including political parties and voters, respond to rising economic inequality in electoral competition, each essay provides explanations of why voter-party linkages based on redistributive preferences weaken when economic inequality increases.The first essay investigates why, counterintuitively, the poor do not vote for leftist parties at the ballot box. While previous studies answer this question by focusing on potential factors distracting the poor from their economic interests, they fail to account for the economic and institutional contexts that may affect the poor's voting calculus. In order to fill this gap, this chapter theorizes that poor voters rely on changes in economic inequality to evaluate the performance of leftist governments. Specifically, I demonstrate that the poor support leftist parties only if the leftist government successfully advances the economic well-being of the poor by reducing economic inequality. Employing a hierarchical regression analysis using survey data from 54 elections across 21 advanced democracies, I find that income-based voting decreases when the wealth gap widens under leftist governments.The second essay focuses on right-wing parties' responses to changes in economic inequality in electoral competition. This chapter argues that the varying degrees of political constraints in advanced and emerging democracies incentivize right-wing parties to respond in different manners to the various levels of economic inequality. Specifically, rightist parties in advanced democracies attempt to politicize social issues in the face of high inequality. The reason underlying this attempt is that in advanced democracies stronger political constraints imposed on the strategic choice of party leadership curb opportunistic policy moderation of the rightist parties. In nascent democracies, however, the right-wing parties opt for more leftist positions within the economic dimension. I find supporting evidence for the predictions using 1754 party platforms of 475 parties in 44 democracies.The last essay empirically examines factors that may affect the intensity of ethnic appeals of political parties in electoral competition. In order to investigate the determinants of ethnic appeals, I focus on political and economic conditions that shape the incentive of political parties to engage in ethnic appeals in their pursuit of electoral gain. Relying on previous research studying ethnic politics, I then identify political and economic factors that are argued to incentivize political entrepreneurs to mobilize voters around ethnic issues. I find consistent evidence that economic inequality between (or within) ethnic groups is positively (or negatively) correlated with the intensity of parties' ethnic appeals using the information on party platforms of 386 parties across 27 democracies, whereas I fail to find supporting evidence for the effects of the other factors on ethnic appeals. The results of empirical analysis provide important implications for policy makers to minimize the negative consequences of ethnic politics in ethnically divided societies.This dissertation contributes to the better understanding of the relationship between inequality and redistribution by offering alternative mechanisms of how greater economic disparity causes the breakdown of programmatic voter-party linkages based on economic preferences. Each chapter demonstrates how rising economic inequality may induce political agents - voters and parties – to respond it in a manner that de-emphasizes a redistribution issue in their pursuit of self-interest in elections. In doing so, this dissertation highlights the importance of dynamics between political actors in electoral politics in understanding the relationship between economic inequality and redistributive outcomes in democracies.
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