The New Gilded Age and the Evolution of the SES Gaps in Interpersonal Political Discussion in Western Europe

Abstract. Larger gaps in political engagement between individuals with high and low socioeconomic status (SES) are increasingly viewed as a threat to democratic quality. This paper investigates how such gaps in interpersonal political discussion have evolved in Western Europe over the last fifty years. While prior empirical work has often found these gaps to be stable, leading models of political behavior suggest they should have changed in response to rising economic inequality—though they differ on whether those changes were driven by increases or decreases in participation, and whether they were led by individuals at the top or bottom of the SES distribution. To evaluate these expectations, I analyze nearly one million survey responses from 843 Eurobarometer surveys conducted across 141 time points between 1973 and 2021. I find that SES gaps in political discussion followed an inverse quadratic trajectory: narrowing from the 1970s through the 1990s, and then widening again to levels comparable to those observed in the 1980s. Using Cross-Sectional Autoregressive Distributed Lag (CS-ARDL) models, I identify economic inequality as the strongest predictor of this trend. Its effect, however, is negative—higher inequality is associated with narrower gaps in political discussion. The results also show that the evolution of these gaps was driven largely by shifts in political discussion among high-SES individuals, rather than disengagement among the less advantaged. Overall, the results do not suggest that economic inequality has driven increases in political discussion gaps. Instead, they point to the role that internet expansion and party fragmentation may have played in widening these gaps since the early 2000s.