Understanding Social Cohesion in the Face of Inequalities: Concepts, Methods, Evaluations

Description

Inequality is potentially a threat to several aspects of social cohesion, such as horizontal ties, vertical ties and the ability to produce common goods through collective action. Inequality at the societal level is related to weaker horizontal ties, indicated by increased violence and crime and decreased interpersonal trust. More generally, inequality creates a perception of competitiveness between people. Societal inequality could weaken vertical ties by decreasing political engagement, support for democracy and trust in institutions. Furthermore, group-based inequality perceived as unfair is the catalyst of social protest, which may strengthen social ties within groups but weaken ties between groups.

At the same time, under certain conditions, inequality can also strengthen social cohesion. For example, inequality fosters public goods creation in small group cooperation games.

Shifting back to the societal level, inequality potentially threatens the fair deliberation about which public goods society should pursue (i.e., the democratic political process). In this regard, political power depends not only on economic resources but also on other dimensions of inequality. For example, people’s level of education matters, as the government (at all levels, legislative but especially executive branches) is run by higher educated people; higher educated voters’ preferences are also more often transformed into policy compared to those of other voters.

Against this background, this cluster investigates how inequalities in material, human and social resources as well as perceptions of these inequalities as unfair shape and strain the horizontal and vertical ties that underpin social cohesion, how the presence of social ties conversely shapes the perception and impact of inequality and how social ties and inequality interact in the production of common goods. Inequality is treated as a potential driver of tension across domains such as climate adaptation, care and migration, where divisions can surface and escalate. The cluster also examines a related normative question regarding how societies can allocate the moral responsibility for tackling certain inequalities.

We examine when inequality, or inequality perceived as unfair, undermines belonging, trust or cooperation and when interventions can instead strengthen these.

Dive Deeper

Overview of PhD projects

Project 1: Repairing Injustice Without Breaking Bonds: Structural Injustice and Social Cohesion

Phil Robichaud (Philosophy, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and Dan Redhead (Sociology, University of Groningen)

Project 2: Collective Action, Cohesion and Inequality

Rense Corten (Sociology, Utrecht University) and Andi Schmidt (Philosophy, University of Groningen)

Project 3: Educational Segregation and Polarization: How Network Diversity and Avoidance Affect Debates on the Public Good

Toon Kuppens (Social Psychology, University of Groningen) and Eva Jaspers (Sociology, Utrecht University)

The three projects address inequality’s impact on social cohesion from complementary angles:

Structural injustice and cohesion: a normative and empirical study of when addressing injustice strengthens or weakens social bonds.
Inequality and collective action: an experimental analysis studying the mechanisms of how inequality impacts the emergence of collective action, as mediated by social relations.
Segregation and polarization: how network diversity (both economic and educational) and avoidance affect the potential to reach consensus on which public goods to pursue.

How Are the Projects Related?

The key construct the projects have in common is inequality, but they differ in the type of inequality studied (resource inequality, educational inequality). All projects study a form of social cohesion as an outcome variable. Projects 1 and 2 study resource inequality. Projects 1 and 3 study the role of segregation. All projects include a focus on the production of public goods (whether in social dilemmas or at the societal level) and how inequality might help or hinder this in interaction with the presence of social ties.

Synergy / Added Value

Together, the projects integrate philosophical, sociological and psychological perspectives, enabling cross‑project comparison across domains and methods. This makes it possible to obtain generalizable insights into inequality–cohesion dynamics that are applicable to many different cases. The inclusion of very different methodologies and literatures will enable a richer discussion of theoretical constructs (such as inequality, cohesion) and more diversity in their measurement. As the PhD projects progress, we will develop a conceptual map of different aspects of the relation between inequality and social cohesion, which will be a starting point for a discussion with the SOCION community.

Another way in which the projects add value to each other is that all include behavioural experiments that investigate inequality and cohesion. Combining the relevant expertise and experiences will benefit all projects.

Finally, we will apply to use Statistics Netherlands (CBS) and Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS) microdata together.