Rising Powers: Unequal Powers, Authoritarian Powers, Unstable Powers?

Taken together, Russia and China account for 41 per cent of the total territory of the BRICs, and for 51 per cent of their total population and 63 per cent of their GDP/PPP. On Goldman Sachs projections China will be the world's largest economy by 2050, and Russia its sixth largest; per head of population, on the same projections, Russia will have the world's fourth largest GDP/head and China its twelfth largest.

A striking feature of the two countries is not just the rate but also the strikingly inegalitarian nature of their development - notwithstanding a shared (post)communist legacy. Indeed on most conventional measures, these two countries are now among the most unequal in the world. According to Russian official statistics, the Gini coefficient had risen to .42 by 2010; the best estimates of Chinese Gini coefficients indicate a very similar rise from .26 in 1983 - just after the introduction of the contract responsibility system - to .45 in 2006, the last year available. On World Bank figures, Gini coefficients were already higher in Russia than in the UK, and higher in China than in the United States. Reflecting these developments, China had moved up to second place in Forbes' list of the world's billionaires by 2011, with Russia in third place.

One of the oldest findings of political science is that there is an association between economic inequality and political instability. As Aristotle pointed out in his Politics, 'when men are equal they are contented'; he drew attention to the people of Tarentum, who, 'by sharing the use of their own property with the poor, [gained] their good will'. Accordingly, 'democracy appears to be safer and less liable to revolution than oligarchy'. Concerns of this kind have been apparent in many later writers, including John Stuart Mill, who provided in his Representative Government for additional votes for those who exercised 'superior [managerial] functions' on the reasonable assumption that the poor would otherwise use their electoral preponderance to put through 'class legislation'.

We seek in this project to examine the following propositions: (i) that these two BRIC countries are becoming increasingly unequal; (ii) that within them, political power and economic advantage are increasingly closely associated; (iii) that their political systems have increasingly been employed to ensure that no effective challenge can be mounted to that combination of government position and economic advantage, either by 'ballot box' or other avenues; and that (iv) set against a broader comparative perspective, an increasingly unequal society in which government is effectively immune from conventional challenge is likely to become increasingly repressive, or unstable, or both (with considerable implications for the international community as a whole).

We propose to draw our evidence from national and international statistics, the academic literature that has appeared in both countries as well as the West, a series of interviews with policy specialists and relevant government officials, two dozen focus groups that will focus on issues of social justice and politics as perceived by ordinary citizens, and a detailed empirical analysis of the management of the largest companies in both countries in order to establish their connections with senior state officials. A final part of the analysis will employ crossnational evidence (including both aggregate and individual-level data such as the World Values Survey) to test a series of hypotheses relating to the association between inequality and political instability, setting both countries within a context that will include (for instance) the countries that have been affected by the 'Arab Spring'.

We envisage beneficiaries in five main areas:

- UK government, with particular reference to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Department for International Development and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills as well as the Scottish government and UK representation abroad, and including the relevant parliamentary groups at Westminster and Holyrood;

- government outside the UK, including EU institutions such as ECRAN (the Europe China Research and Advice Network), which is a three-year project funded by the European Union to provide advice on China to European policy-makers, and within Russia and China themselves, making use in the former case of the extensive high-level connections of our proposed Moscow-based associates

- International non-government agencies, including our existing contacts with the World Bank in China and Washington DC, and with other bodies such as UNRISD in Geneva and the British Council

- UK secondary and higher education, including the large university classes that are taught by members of the investigatory team and the research students they supervise, helping in this way to develop UK capacity in the study of these two countries that is informed by contemporary social science (a research studentship is itself part of this application)

- the UK and international public, through for instance the project website and regular contributions to the printed and electronic media.

Russia and China are respectively the world's largest country and its most populous; they are among the world's largest economies and on current projections will be still more important in the decades to come; between them, they dominate the BRICs. The proposal would draw on many years of specialised study and within-country experience on the part of the investigators, together with the established authority and insights of experts within these countries themselves, a command of the relevant languages and advanced statistical skills to deliver a series of important benefits to public policy in the UK and beyond including:

- for UK government, an empirically grounded and rigorous analysis of the development prospects of two major international players, with a particular focus on the extent to which growing (but perhaps stabilising) levels of domestic inequality may prejudice their stability in the near and medium-term future; we would expect to provide our advice most often in the form of portable presentations of a kind that we have been given to understand would be the most suitable for such purposes but also (for instance) through meetings with UK diplomatic representatives within these countries themselves

- for UK higher and secondary education, through lectures, occasional ad hoc conferences and research supervision (including the linked postgraduate studentship), we would provide a means of developing additional capacity in language-based area studies as recommended by the International Benchmarking Review of UK Politics and International Studies (2007), making use of the outstanding resources that are available on or within easy reach of the Glasgow campus

- for UK and broader international audiences, a flow of expert commentary on issues that directly affect them and their future. The stability of two of the world's largest economies has for instance a direct bearing on the development of international markets, issues of global security and legal and illegal migration among others; our commentaries would be make use of the applicants' extensive connections and long experience of work in the printed and electronic media, and of the project website.