Local wealth inequality linked to political protests across the Global South

Zhiwu Wei, Davide Luca, Neil Lee and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: The political consequences of inequality have become a matter of mounting concern. Relative deprivation theory posits that frustration arising from comparisons with proximate reference groups can fuel protests. Yet research has concentrated overwhelmingly on the Global North, notwithstanding the acute wealth disparities experienced by the majority of the world’s population in the Global South. To address this gap, we assemble novel, fine-grained estimates of relative wealth at the 2.4 km × 2.4 km grid level to derive measures of local wealth inequality, which we link to over 645,000 georeferenced protest events recorded from 2014 to 2018. Exploiting variation within subnational regions, we document a robust, positive association between local wealth inequality and protest incidence. We show that the inequality–protest relationship is anchored in individuals’ immediate surroundings. As the spatial radius defining ‘local’ expands, the association weakens, highlighting the primacy of experienced inequality. We also find that the inequality-protest link is mediated by national characteristics. The study advances the social sciences by furnishing novel empirical evidence on the micro-geographic underpinnings of political instability, demonstrating that inequality’s political effects hinge on proximity, local class structure and national institutional environment.

Keywords: protest; inequality; wealth; Global South; subnational analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28 pages
Date: 2026-04
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/137937/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:137937

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().