Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America
Martin Gilens
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 0691162425
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Can a country be a democracy if its government only responds to the preferences of the rich? In an ideal democracy, all citizens should have equal influence on government policy--but as this book demonstrates, America's policymakers respond almost exclusively to the preferences of the economically advantaged. Affluence and Influence definitively explores how political inequality in the United States has evolved over the last several decades and how this growing disparity has been shaped by interest groups, parties, and elections.
With sharp analysis and an impressive range of data, Martin Gilens looks at thousands of proposed policy changes, and the degree of support for each among poor, middle-class, and affluent Americans. His findings are staggering: when preferences of low- or middle-income Americans diverge from those of the affluent, there is virtually no relationship between policy outcomes and the desires of less advantaged groups. In contrast, affluent Americans' preferences exhibit a substantial relationship with policy outcomes whether their preferences are shared by lower-income groups or not. Gilens shows that representational inequality is spread widely across different policy domains and time periods. Yet Gilens also shows that under specific circumstances the preferences of the middle class and, to a lesser extent, the poor, do seem to matter. In particular, impending elections--especially presidential elections--and an even partisan division in Congress mitigate representational inequality and boost responsiveness to the preferences of the broader public.
At a time when economic and political inequality in the United States only continues to rise, Affluence and Influence raises important questions about whether American democracy is truly responding to the needs of all its citizens.
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Citizens’ policy preferences will, to some degree at least, tend to cancel out when preferences are aggregated across the public as a whole (or across distinctive subgroups of the public). Aggregate opinion, by this reckoning, will typically be more stable, with a higher signal to noise ratio than the individual opinions that make it up. Cue Taking as a Basis for Political Preferences Given the stringent standards for the democratic citizen laid out by Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee, it is not.
But it rarely receives media coverage unless a dramatic incident creates a news event, or it becomes the subject of a court decision, or politicians raise the issue during an election. Finally, not every kind of policy issue the federal government addresses is appropriate for inclusion in analyses of the role of public preferences in shaping policy outcomes. Some policies are simply too technical or too obscure to reasonably be held to the delegate model of representation. While citizens might.
Policy is strongly related to public preferences but with a substantial bias toward the status quo. In this diagram policies that lack majority support are never adopted, but policies favored by a majority of citizens are adopted only 70 percent of the time (compared with 100 percent in the “perfectly responsive majoritarian” example in the upper right panel). Finally, the lower right panel reflects a fairly responsive government with a strong status quo bias. In this hypothetical world, even.
Preferences of low- and middleincome Americans, with much weaker (but still positive) associations with the preferences of the affluent. Unions tended to side with the poor and the middle class in opposing free-trade policies and cuts in capital gains and corporate income taxes, and in supporting increases in the minimum wage and the right to strike for groups like firefighters, police officers, and college teachers. Some of these favored changes were supported at lower levels by the affluent.
Associated with greater responsiveness to the preferences of the public and lower levels of representational inequality. These and the other analyses in chapters 6 and 7 suggest that American democracy works, at least in the sense that electoral competition generates policy outcomes more responsive to the preferences of the public and (under some limited circumstances) more equally responsive to poor, middle-class, and affluent Americans. But the circumstances that generate these democratically.