Inequality is cumulative when advantages in different dimensions — property, social honour, education, political influence — coincide, so that the same people stand at the top of every ladder. It is dispersed when the dimensions come apart, so that those who hold wealth are not those who hold office, and those with ritual standing are not those with either. The distinction is not about the amount of inequality but about its architecture, and the architecture decides whether a society has one ruling group or several competing ones.
Where it comes from
Robert Dahl coined the phrase dispersed inequalities in his study of New Haven. Asking who actually governed the city, he traced decisions across urban redevelopment, public schooling and party nominations and found different sets of actors prevailing in each. Wealth, social standing, popularity, organisational skill and access to officials were resources held by distinct groups, none able to convert its advantage across every arena. This became the empirical core of pluralist theory, set directly against C. Wright Mills, for whom the commanding positions in the corporate, military and political orders interlocked into a single power elite.
How it works
Where inequalities are cumulative, knowing one position predicts the others and opposition faces the same adversary everywhere. Where they are dispersed, each group has some resource and must bargain, so coalitions shift by issue. Dispersal does not equalise anything — it multiplies the sites of unequal advantage while denying any one group a monopoly. Critics of Dahl reply that studying visible decisions misses the power to keep issues off the agenda entirely.
Why it matters
The distinction organises the Indian debate on caste, class and power. Béteille found in Sripuram that the three had once been congruent in the Brahmins and were becoming disjunct, with land, ritual rank and political office moving to different castes. Whether India is drifting from a cumulative towards a dispersed order — and whether Dalits at the bottom are excluded from that drift — remains the sharpest question in Indian stratification.
For the UPSC answer
Define the two architectures in one sentence each, attribute dispersed inequalities to Dahl and the cumulative view to Mills, then bring the debate home through Béteille on Sripuram. Note that dispersal is a claim about the distribution of advantages, not about their reduction.
References & further reading
- Dahl, R. A. (1961). Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. Yale University Press.
- Mills, C. W. (1956). The Power Elite. Oxford University Press.
- Béteille, A. (1965). Caste, Class and Power: Changing Patterns of Stratification in a Tanjore Village. University of California Press.