Across the world populist leaders are mobilizing citizens increasingly frustrated with political institutions and market outcomes, while analysts struggle to explain where liberal democracy has gone wrong. Unequal Democracy traces the roots of this dissatisfaction, arguing that persistent inequality and polarization constrain citizenship, weaken participation, and undermine democratic governance. Drawing on lessons from Latin America, long central to scholarship on democratic formation and breakdown, the volume uses these insights to make sense of the contemporary crisis.

Inspired by Philip Oxhorn’s work on civil society and citizenship, the book presents case studies from Argentina and Chile, Mexico, Paraguay and Guatemala, Peru, the United States, Egypt and Syria, and South Africa. Contributors explore how social movements engage political parties; how marginalized groups gain access to social policy; how media and immigration shape political inclusion; and how states manage inequality, including through policing. Collectively, they identify the failure to extend citizenship beyond formal political rights to civil and social rights, necessary for equal participation.

Reaffirming that neopluralism deepens inequality, fuels polarization, and weakens democracy, this thought-provoking work foregrounds the heterogeneity of civil society and contends that democratic progress is more likely to emerge through institutional adaptation than sweeping collective mobilization.