The Tocqueville effect is the phenomenon that, as social conditions and opportunities improve, social frustration grows more quickly. The effect is based on Alexis de Tocqueville's observations on the French Revolution and later reforms in Europe and the United States. Another way to describe the effect is the aphorism "the appetite grows by what it feeds on". For instance, after greater social justice is achieved, there may be more fervent opposition to even smaller social injustices than before.
The effect suggests a link between social equality or concessions by the regime and unintended consequences. According to the Tocqueville effect, a revolution is likely to occur after an improvement in social conditions in contrast to Marx's theory of progressive immiseration of the proletariat (deterioration of conditions).
Origin
Alexis de Tocqueville described the phenomenon in his book Democracy in America (1840):
"The hatred that men bear to privilege increases in proportion as privileges become fewer and less considerable, so that democratic passions would seem to burn most fiercely just when they have least fuel. I have already given the reason for this phenomenon. When all conditions are unequal, no inequality is so great as to offend the eye, whereas the slightest dissimilarity is odious in the midst of general uniformity; the more complete this uniformity is, the more insupportable the sight of such a difference becomes. Hence it is natural that the love of equality should constantly increase together with equality itself, and that it should grow by what it feeds on."