Relative deprivation is the sense of disadvantage that arises not from absolute want but from a comparison — between what people have and what they believe they are entitled to have, or between their own condition and that of others they regard as comparable. Its central insight is that grievance is a subjective and relational fact: the same objective circumstances can be borne contentedly or resented bitterly depending on the standard against which they are judged.
The concept therefore reverses a common-sense expectation. Discontent does not track absolute hardship, and the poorest are frequently the least rebellious, precisely because their horizon of comparison is narrow. Deprivation becomes politically consequential when expectations rise, when a reference group is newly available, and when the gap between expectation and attainment is felt as illegitimate rather than natural.
Origins: Stouffer and reference groups
The idea emerged from Samuel Stouffer and his colleagues in The American Soldier (1949), a study of morale in the United States Army during the Second World War. Its findings were counter-intuitive. Satisfaction with promotion was lower in the Air Corps, where promotion was rapid and widespread, than in the Military Police, where it was slow — because rapid promotion around them raised each soldier's expectations. Similarly, black soldiers stationed in the Southern states, though facing harsher segregation, sometimes reported better morale than those in the North, since their comparison was with local black civilians rather than with white soldiers.
Robert Merton supplied the theoretical apparatus in Social Theory and Social Structure, arguing that people evaluate their situation against reference groups — groups whose standards they adopt as their own, whether or not they belong to them. This turned an empirical curiosity into a general mechanism: change the group against which comparison is made, and satisfaction changes without any alteration of objective conditions. Merton thereby linked relative deprivation to his account of anomie, in which universalised goals collide with restricted means.
Runciman's egoistic and fraternalistic deprivation
W. G. Runciman (1966) refined the concept in a study of inequality and class attitudes in England. He specified its conditions: a person is relatively deprived of something when they do not have it, see others possessing it, want it, and regard it as feasible for themselves. Crucially, he distinguished two forms. Egoistic deprivation is felt by an individual comparing their position with others within their own group — the passed-over clerk resenting a promoted colleague. Fraternalistic (or group) deprivation is felt on behalf of one's whole group in comparison with another group.
The distinction carries the analytical weight. Egoistic deprivation typically produces personal striving, envy or withdrawal; only fraternalistic deprivation generates collective action, because only it defines the injury as shared and the remedy as political. Runciman also noted the frequent mismatch between objective inequality and felt deprivation: the English working class of his study endured wide inequalities with modest resentment because its comparisons remained local.
From grievance to revolt
James Davies (1962) proposed the J-curve hypothesis to explain revolutions. Rebellion, he argued, is most likely not during prolonged misery but after a sustained period of improvement in conditions is followed by a sharp reversal. Expectations, having been raised, continue to climb while actual satisfaction falls away, and the widening gap becomes intolerable. Ted Gurr (1970) generalised this into a broad theory of political violence, treating relative deprivation as the fundamental source of the discontent that movements mobilise.
Backward-class and Dalit mobilisation in India
M. S. A. Rao made relative deprivation the organising concept of Indian social-movement analysis in Social Movements and Social Transformation (1979). Studying the Ezhava movement in Kerala and the Yadava movement in north India, he argued that objective backwardness alone explains nothing; movements arise when a group becomes conscious of a gap between its improving secular position — in education, landholding, trade or numbers — and its continued low ritual and social status.
The mechanism is instructive. Ezhavas who acquired education, mobility and wealth under colonial conditions found ritual disabilities newly insupportable, and the Sree Narayana Dharma Paripalana movement articulated that contradiction; Yadava assertion likewise followed gains in land and cultivation. Rao insisted that the deprivation must be fraternalistic and structurally produced, and that ideology, leadership and organisation are needed to convert it into sustained mobilisation. The same logic illuminates Dalit assertion: the first generation to gain education and secure employment through reservation experiences continuing humiliation as an intensified grievance — deprivation felt most acutely by those who have advanced, not by those who never moved.
Criticisms
Three objections recur. First, the concept is often applied post hoc: deprivation is inferred from the movement it is meant to explain, making the argument circular. Second, it is hard to measure, since expectations and reference groups are inner states reconstructed after the event. Third, deprivation is at best necessary and never sufficient — resource-mobilisation theorists note that grievance is nearly universal while movements are rare, so the decisive variables are organisation, resources, networks and political opportunity. Relative deprivation explains why people might be aggrieved, not why they act when they do.
For the UPSC answer
State at the outset that deprivation here is comparative and subjective — a gap between expectation and attainment — and that this is why the poorest are often the least mobilised. Runciman's fraternalistic-versus-egoistic distinction is the single most useful line in the answer, since it explains why some grievances individualise and others politicise. For Indian questions on backward-class or Dalit movements, use Rao's finding that mobilisation followed secular gains colliding with persisting ritual subordination, and add the J-curve if the question concerns revolt or agitation. Always close with the limitation — grievance is ubiquitous, movements are not — and note that resource mobilisation supplies what relative deprivation cannot.
References & further reading
- Stouffer, S. A. et al. (1949). The American Soldier: Adjustment During Army Life. Princeton University Press.
- Merton, R. K. (1957). Social Theory and Social Structure, revised edition. Free Press.
- Runciman, W. G. (1966). Relative Deprivation and Social Justice. Routledge and Kegan Paul.
- Davies, J. C. (1962). Toward a Theory of Revolution. American Sociological Review, 27(1).
- Gurr, T. R. (1970). Why Men Rebel. Princeton University Press.
- Rao, M. S. A. (1979). Social Movements and Social Transformation: A Study of Two Backward Classes Movements in India. Macmillan.