ABSTRACT
This chapter brings together multi-disciplinary and cross-national perspectives to explore the concept of political inequality. Many disciplines range across the wide field of political inequality. Political inequality is found in political science literatures on democratic theory and practice, sociological literatures on social stratification and power, philosophical literatures on the nature of equality, law and policy literatures on equality legislation, and potentially in any study of decision-making processes characterized as political, from preindustrial societies to modern ones. Political inequality is a concern for all those who interact with political systems. Scholars since Aristotle have written about it. Citizens have created social movements to eradicate it. Political inequality is like other major forms of inequality economic, educational, gender, ethnicity, to name a few in that it is studied in a variety of disciplines and from different theoretical perspectives. Political inequality is analytically distinct from other forms of inequality; it deserves its own theoretical treatment and empirical analysis.
