Inequality and the Fading of Redistributive Politics

Acknowledgments This project began with a workshop supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) in May 2010, at which authors presented initial drafts of their chapters. We owe a special debt of thanks to Deanna Pikkov, who helped organize both the workshop and the successful SSHRC grant application that funded it. Numerous colleagues and graduate students from across Canada and the United States joined us as discussants at the workshop, including played a particularly important role. Their task was to provide us with a discussion of the project from an international perspective and to advise us on its overall structure. Their comments were extremely influential with regard to the way we have developed the themes of the volume. Our colleagues at Statistics Canada, Feng Hou and Garnett Picot, provided important interventions that kept us from making silly mistakes in our reading of the data. In 2011, a set of the revised chapters was presented in linked panels during the annual meetings of the Canadian Political Science Association. Special thanks to our discussants, Michael Prince, Stephen McBride, and Kent Weaver, whose comments enriched not only the individual chapters but also the collective enterprise. x Acknowledgments Along the way, we benefitted from the professional assistance of several talented people. Elizabeth Thompson edited each chapter to enhance its readability for a broad audience. Valerie Jarus managed the electronic challenges involved in consolidating sixteen chapters into a single text. Thank you, Elizabeth and Valerie. At UBC Press, our editor, Emily Andrew, was a superb and supportive guide through the editorial process. As usual, peer review greatly enhanced the quality of the final product, and thanks are due to the two anonymous reviewers for UBC Press who had a lot of reading to do. Our deepest expression of gratitude goes to the chapter authors. Following the conference, they returned to their offices to draft full papers. We then submitted them to several merciless rounds of revisions. Like true professionals , they responded to our demands as well as to comments from external reviewers with alacrity and grace. The end result was worth the effort. Many of their chapters will become instant " classics. " This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by SSHRC. At its best, …