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At the heart of the study of politics is a question about who gets what and when. Consequently, inequality features as a central theme in the discipline. Scholars have studied how inequality shapes democratization, redistribution, voting behavior, and how the institutions of welfare and taxation in turn shape inequality. More recently, scholars have started to pay attention to how inequality across and within ethnicities, races, and gender may matter to political outcomes. The centrality of inequality is reflected in the significant increase in quantity and quality of research on this subject over the past two decades. This seminar is designed to provide you with a critical overview of the field, both theoretically and empirically. We will briefly review the normative foundations and conceptual complexities involved in the study of inequality. Measures of inequality vary in their analytical properties, and it is important to choose the right one. We will review the main issues when measuring inequality. We will then proceed thematically. We will examine the political, and institutional foundations of income inequality and also its effects on institutional development, political participation and voting choice. Next, we examine the individual-level determinants of economic and political preferences, and how inequality intersects with race and gender. We end with a discussion of the social effects of inequality and what constraints exist to addressing inequality.