“America is a rigged oligarchy, and that’s not a conspiracy theory — it’s fact. Now, however, millions of Americans are becoming aware of it thanks to the populist campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. America’s elections are controlled by a big club, but unfortunately, “you ain’t in it!””
4/12/2016, “2016: The Year Americans Found out Our Elections Are Rigged,“ The Anti Media, Nick Bernabe, opinion, Denver, Colorado
““Now it’s just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors, and U.S. senators and congress members.” — Former President Jimmy Carter
“The 2016 election has been a wild ride, with two insurgent grassroots campaigns literally giving the political establishment a run for its money. But as the events of this presidential primary season play out, it’s becoming clear the U.S. election — and even more so, the presidential race — is a rigged scam being perpetrated on the American people.
Events from the last week [April 2016] have exposed the system as an illusion of choice and a farce. They have reinforced at least one study showing the U.S. is an oligarchy [alternate link for this study: 4/7/2014, “Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy,” BBC] rather than a democratic republic.
The Wyoming democratic caucus took place on Saturday, purportedly to allow voters to have their voices heard in the race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton. Sanders lost the Wyoming caucus by winning it with a 12 percent margin.
Wait, what? How does one lose by winning 56 percent of the votes? This happens when the political process is, according to the New York Post, “rigged” by superdelegates. The Post summed up this “strange” phenomenon:
“[U]nder the Democratic Party’s oddball delegate system, Sanders’ winning streak — he has won seven out of the past eight contests — counts for little.
“In fact, despite his win, he splits Wyoming’s 14 pledged delegates 7 to 7 under the caucus calculus.
“Clinton, meanwhile, also gets the state’s four superdelegates — who had already pledged their allegiance to her in January. So despite ‘losing,’ she triumphs 11-7 in the delegate tally.”
Even media pundits on MSNBC openly called the process rigged: @BernieSanders wins WY but @HillaryClinton nets more delegates… @JoeNBC: It is a system rigged against voters https://t.co/C15I9inLAH— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) April 11, 2016
The superdelegate process is complicated, as we’ve noted before, but they have one essential function: to prevent candidates like Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a video of Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz explaining superdelegates. [You Tube link]
Adding insult to injury, even when Sanders does win states (despite Hillary’s advantage in superdelegates), the media can be reliably counted on to discount Sanders’ wins as nothing more than prolonging the electoral process, which will inevitably elect the presumptive nominee, Hillary Clinton. This pervasive commentary continues despite the fact Sanders only trails her by several hundred pledged delegates.
UPDATE 1: Sanders Supporters Vindicated: Proof DNC Used Media to Rig Election for Hillary
UPDATE 2: Leaked DNC Emails Confirm Democrats Rigged Primary for Hillary
Meanwhile, according to the same media, the non-establishment Trump campaign is threatened every time Ted Cruz beats him — even though Trump leads by a larger percentage of pledged delegates than Clinton does. When Clinton loses, it doesn’t matter because she already has the nomination locked up. When Trump loses, his campaign is in big trouble. Starting to see the problem with the media coverage?
When you examine these media narratives, a troubling pattern emerges that goes beyond the political establishment’s self-interest. You begin to see that American corporate media also functions as an arm of the political machine, protecting establishment candidates while attacking — or dismissing — candidates who seem non-establishment.
This brings us to the events that transpired during the Republican nomination process in Colorado on Saturday [April 2016]. The Republican Party of Colorado didn’t even bother letting people vote before using arcane rules to strip the democratic process of its democracy. According to the Denver Post:
“Colorado GOP leaders canceled the party’s presidential straw poll in August [2015] to avoid binding its delegates to a candidate who may not survive until the Republican National Convention in July [2016].
“Instead, Republicans selected national delegates through the caucus process, a move that put the election of national delegates in the hands of party insiders and activists — leaving roughly 90 percent of the more than 1 million Republican voters on the sidelines.”
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s non-establishment campaign walked away with zero delegates. They were all “awarded” to Ted Cruz.
“How is it possible that the people of the great State of Colorado never got to vote in the Republican Primary? Great anger — totally unfair!” Trump said on Twitter. “The people of Colorado had their vote taken away from them by the phony politicians. Biggest story in politics. This will not be allowed!”
In an interview on Monday, Trump was even more frank. “The system is rigged, it’s crooked,” he said.
The Colorado GOP didn’t even bother hiding its intentions, tweeting — then quickly removing — what was possibly the most honest insight into the back-door dealing so far this election season: [“We did it. #NeverTrump”]
The Republican party chooses the nominee, not the voting public. Still in disbelief? Watch a Republican National Committee member explain it better than I can:
What we are witnessing — for the first time on a large scale — is the political establishment’s true role in selecting the president of the United States. The illusion of choice has become apparent.
The establishment anoints their two picks for president, and the country proceeds to argue vehemently over the two candidates they are spoon-fed. This dynamic is reminiscent of a prophetic 1998 quote from philosopher Noam Chomsky:
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.”
Ahh, the illusion of choice. Sure, in reality there are third party candidates who should be given a fair shake, but in our mainstream media-augmented reality, third parties do not exist. They aren’t mentioned. They aren’t even included in presidential debates. This is another way the media stifles healthy debate, stamps out dissenting opinions, and preserves the status-quo.
“We The People” don’t choose our presidents; they are hand-picked by a powerful group of political party insiders — parties that have long since sold out to the highest bidders. What we have on our hands in America is a rigged oligarchy, and that’s not a conspiracy theory — it’s fact. Now, however, millions of Americans are becoming aware of it thanks to the populist campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. America’s elections are controlled by a big club, but unfortunately, “you ain’t in it!”"
“This article (2016: The Year Americans Found out Our Elections Are Rigged) is an opinion editorial (OP-ED). The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent the views of Anti-Media. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Nick Bernabe and theAntiMedia.org. Anti-Media Radio airs weeknights at 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Image credits: Gage Skidmore/Michael Vadon. If you spot a typo, email edits@theantimedia.org.”
…………………………..
Added: 2014 study referenced above: US is an oligarchy, not a representative democracy:
"We believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened."
9/18/2014, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, cambridge.org, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595
“Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.
A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
Who governs? Who really rules? To what extent is the broad body of U.S. citizens sovereign, semi-sovereign, or largely powerless? These questions have animated much important work in the study of American politics.
While this body of research is rich and variegated, it can loosely be divided into four families of theories: Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism—Majoritarian Pluralism, in which the interests of all citizens are more or less equally represented, and Biased Pluralism,
in which corporations, business associations, and professional groups
predominate. Each of these perspectives makes different predictions
about the independent influence upon U.S. policy making of four sets of
actors: the Average Citizen or “median voter,” Economic Elites, and Mass-based or Business-oriented Interest Groups or industries.
Each of these theoretical traditions has given rise to a
large body of literature. Each is supported by a great deal of empirical
evidence—some of it quantitative, some historical, some
observational—concerning the importance of various sets of actors (or,
all too often, a single set of actors) in U.S. policy making. This
literature has made important contributions to our understanding of how
American politics works and has helped illuminate how democratic or
undemocratic (in various senses) our policy making process actually is.
Until very recently, however, it has been impossible to test the
differing predictions of these theories against each other within a
single statistical model that permits one to analyze the independent
effects of each set of actors upon policy outcomes.
Here—in a tentative and preliminary way—we offer such a
test, bringing a unique data set to bear on the problem. Our measures
are far from perfect, but we hope that this first step will help inspire
further research into what we see as some of the most fundamental questions about American politics.
The
central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites
and organized groups representing business interests have substantial
independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based interest
groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence. Our results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
In what follows, we briefly review the four theoretical
traditions that form the framework for our analyses and highlight some
of the most prominent empirical research associated with each. We then
describe our data and measures and present our results. We conclude by
discussing the implications of our work for understanding American
democracy and by identifying some of the directions for future research
that our findings suggest.
Four Theoretical Traditions
Each of the four theoretical traditions we are addressing has produced a body of literature much too vast to review in detail here. We can only allude to a few central pieces of work in each tradition. And we must acknowledge that a particular scholar’s work does not always fall neatly into a single category. Some scholars work across—or independently of—our theoretical categories, embracing multiple influences and complex processes of policy making. Here we focus on ideal types of theory, for the purpose of outlining certain distinctive predictions that those types of theory tend to make. Given the nature of our data, we focus on the societal sources of influence that these theories posit, rather than on the mechanisms of influence that they discuss.
Four Theoretical Traditions
Each of the four theoretical traditions we are addressing has produced a body of literature much too vast to review in detail here. We can only allude to a few central pieces of work in each tradition. And we must acknowledge that a particular scholar’s work does not always fall neatly into a single category. Some scholars work across—or independently of—our theoretical categories, embracing multiple influences and complex processes of policy making. Here we focus on ideal types of theory, for the purpose of outlining certain distinctive predictions that those types of theory tend to make. Given the nature of our data, we focus on the societal sources of influence that these theories posit, rather than on the mechanisms of influence that they discuss.
Majoritarian Electoral Democracy
Theories
of majoritarian electoral democracy, as positive or empirical theories,
attribute U.S. government policies chiefly to the collective will of
average citizens, who are seen as empowered by democratic elections. Such
thinking goes back at least to Tocqueville, who (during the Jacksonian
era) saw American majorities as “omnipotent”—particularly at the state
level—and worried about “tyranny of the majority.” 1
It is encapsulated in Abraham Lincoln’s reference to government “of the
people, by the people, for the people,” and was labeled by Robert Dahl
“populistic democracy.” 2
An important modern incarnation of this tradition is found
in rational choice theories of electoral democracy, in which
vote-seeking parties or candidates in a two-party system tend to
converge at the mid-point of citizens’ policy preferences. If
preferences are jointly single-peaked so that they can be arrayed along a
single dimension, the “median voter theorem”—posited verbally by Harold
Hotelling, proved by Duncan Black, and popularized by Anthony Downs in
his Economic Theory of Democracy—states that two
vote-seeking parties will both take the same position, at the center of
the distribution of voters’ most-preferred positions. Under the
relevant assumptions, public policy that fits the preferences of the
median voter is not only the empirically-predicted equilibrium result of
two-party electoral competition; as the “Condorcet winner” it also has
the normative property of being the “most democratic” policy, in the
sense that it would be preferred to any alternative policy in
head-to-head majority-rule voting by all citizens. 3
Subsequent “chaos” results by social choice theorists,
starting with Kenneth Arrow, have indicated that the median voter
prediction follows logically only for unidimensional politics. If
citizens’ preference orderings are not unidimensional and are
sufficiently diverse, majority rule—hence also two-party electoral
competition—might not lead to any equilibrium outcome at all. 4 It is important to note, however, that what might
theoretically happen will not necessarily ever happen in practice.
Real-world outcomes depend upon how institutions are organized and how
preferences are actually configured.
Despite the “chaos” results, and despite many criticisms of
the median-voter theorem as simplistic and empirically inapplicable or
wrong, 5
a good many scholars—probably more economists than political scientists
among them—still cling to the idea that the policy preferences of the
median voter tend to drive policy outputs from the U.S. political
system. A fair amount of empirical evidence has been adduced—by Alan
Monroe; Benjamin Page and Robert Shapiro; Robert Erikson, Michael
MacKuen, and James Stimson (authors of the very influential Macro Polity);
and others—that seems to support the notion that the median voter
determines the results of much or most policy making. This evidence
indicates that U.S. federal government policy is consistent with
majority preferences roughly two-thirds of the time; that public policy
changes in the same direction as collective preferences a similar
two-thirds of the time; that the liberalism or conservatism of citizens
is closely associated with the liberalism or conservatism of policy
across states; and that fluctuations in the liberal or conservative
“mood” of the public are strongly associated with changes in the
liberalism or conservatism of policy in all three branches of
government. 6
The fly in the ointment is that none of this evidence
allows for, or explicitly assesses, the impact of such variables as the
preferences of wealthy individuals, or the preferences and actions of
organized interest groups, which may independently influence public
policy while perhaps being positively associated with public
opinion—thereby producing a spurious statistical relationship between
opinion and policy.
Recent research by Larry Bartels and by one of the present
authors (Gilens), which explicitly brings the preferences of “affluent”
Americans into the analysis along with the preferences of those lower in
the income distribution, indicates that the apparent connection between
public policy and the preferences of the average citizen may indeed be
largely or entirely spurious. 7
The “electoral reward and punishment” version of democratic
control through elections—in which voters retrospectively judge how
well the results of government policy have satisfied their basic
interests and values, and politicians enact policies in anticipation of
judgments that they expect will later be made by what V.O. Key, Jr.,
called “latent” public opinion—might be thought to offer a different
prediction: that policy will tend to satisfy citizens’ underlying needs
and values, rather than corresponding with their current policy
preferences. 8
We cannot test this prediction because we do not have—and cannot easily
imagine how to obtain—good data on individuals’ deep, underlying
interests or values, as opposed to their expressed policy preferences.
But the evidence that collective policy preferences are generally rather
stable over time suggests that expressed collective policy preferences
may not often diverge markedly from subsequently manifested “latent”
preferences. They may do so only under special circumstances, such as
economic recessions or disastrous wars. 9
If so, the electoral-reward-and-punishment type of democratic theory,
too, predicts that most of the time public policy will respond to the
current policy preferences of the average citizen.
Economic-Elite Domination
A quite different theoretical tradition argues that U.S.
policy making is dominated by individuals who have substantial economic
resources, i.e., high levels of income or wealth—including, but not
limited to, ownership of business firms.
Not all “elite theories” share this focus. Some emphasize
social status or institutional position—such as the occupancy of key
managerial roles in corporations, or top-level positions in political
parties, in the executive, legislative, or judicial branches of
government, or in the highest ranks of the military. Some elite theories
postulate an amalgam of elites, defined by combinations of social
status, economic resources, and institutional positions, who achieve a
degree of unity through common backgrounds, coinciding interests, and
social interactions.
For example, C. Wright Mills’ important book, The Power Elite,
offers a rather nuanced account of how U.S. social, economic,
political, and military elites have historically alternated in different
configurations of dominance. Mills noted that his elites derived in
substantial proportions from the upper classes, including the very rich
and corporate executives, but their elite status was not defined by
their wealth. 10 Our focus here is on theories that emphasize the policy-making importance of economic elites.
Analyses of U.S. politics centered on economic elites go
back at least to Charles Beard, who maintained that a chief aim of the
framers of the U.S. Constitution was to protect private property,
favoring the economic interests of wealthy merchants and plantation
owners rather than the interests of the then-majority small farmers,
laborers, and craft workers. A landmark work in this tradition is G.
William Domhoff’s detailed account of how elites (working through
foundations, think-tanks, and an “opinion-shaping apparatus,” as well as
through the lobbyists and politicians they finance) may dominate key
issues in U.S. policy making despite the existence of democratic
elections. Philip A. Burch has exhaustively chronicled the economic
backgrounds of federal government officials through American history.
Thomas Ferguson’s analysis of the political importance of “major
investors” might be seen as a theory of economic elites. Most recently,
Jeffrey Winters has posited a comparative theory of “Oligarchy,” in
which the wealthiest citizens—even in a “civil oligarchy” like the
United States—dominate policy concerning crucial issues of wealth and
income protection. 11
Our third and fourth theoretical traditions posit that
public policy generally reflects the outcome of struggle among organized
interest groups and business firms. 12
Majoritarian Pluralism
The roots of what we can characterize as theories of “majoritarian” interest-group pluralism go back to James Madison’s Federalist Paper
No. 10, which analyzed politics in terms of “factions”—a somewhat fuzzy
concept that apparently encompassed political parties and even popular
majorities, as well as what we would today consider organized interest
groups, business firms, and industrial sectors. Madison argued that
struggles among the diverse factions that would be found in an extensive
republic would lead to policies more or less representative of the
needs and interests of the citizenry as a whole—or at least would tend
to defeat “tyrannical” policies, including the much-feared issuance of
inflationary paper money that might cater to local majority factions of
farmer-debtors but would be costly to merchant creditors. 13
In the twentieth century, Arthur Bentley’s The Process of Government and then David Truman’s monumental The Governmental Process
put groups at the center of political analysis, laying out a detailed
picture of how organized interest groups might get their way. Truman
offered a comprehensive and still-interesting catalogue of lobbying
techniques and other methods of group influence. He also added an
ingenious gloss to Madison that tends to increase both the plausibility
and the normative appeal of majoritarian interest-group pluralism: the
assertion that all interests have at least a
minimum of influence in group-dominated policy making, because policy
makers must (in order to avoid subsequent punishment) heed all
“potential” groups that would form if their interests were trampled
upon. 14
Robert Dahl’s analysis of New Haven city politics was
Madisonian or Truman-like in its insistence that many (all?) diverse
interests were represented, though Dahl focused as much on active
members of the general public as on organized groups. Dahl’s analyses of
American politics in terms of “polyarchy” or “pluralist democracy” also
come close to our ideal type of majoritarian pluralist theory, since
they imply that the wants or needs of the average citizen tend to be
reasonably well served by the outcomes of interest-group struggle.
Several contemporary analysts of interest-group politics likewise appear
to accept (at least implicitly) a picture of group struggle that
results in more or less majoritarian results. 15
A major challenge to majoritarian pluralist theories,
however, is posed by Mancur Olson’s argument that collective action by
large, dispersed sets of individuals with individually small but
collectively large interests tends to be prevented by the “free rider”
problem. Barring special circumstances (selective incentives,
byproducts, coercion), individuals who would benefit from collective
action may have no incentive to personally form or join an organized
group. If everyone thinks this way and lets George do it, the job is not
likely to get done. This reasoning suggests that Truman’s “potential
groups” may in fact be unlikely to form, even if millions of peoples’
interests are neglected or harmed by government. Aware of the collective
action problem, officials may feel free to ignore much of the
population and act against the interests of the average citizen. 16
Biased Pluralism
Olson’s argument points toward an important variant line of thinking within the pluralist tradition: theories of “biased”
pluralism, which posit struggles among an unrepresentative universe of
interest groups—characterized by E.E. Schattschneider as a heavenly
chorus with an “upper-class accent,” and more recently dubbed by Kay
Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry Brady an “unheavenly chorus.”
Theories of biased pluralism generally argue that both the thrust of
interest-group conflict and the public policies that result tend to tilt
toward the wishes of corporations and business and professional
associations. 17
Schattschneider suggested that policy outcomes vary with
the “scope of conflict”: for example, that business-oriented interest
groups tend to prevail over ordinary citizens when the scope is narrow
and visibility is low. Grant McConnell added the idea that the actual
“constituencies” of policy implementers can consist of powerful groups.
George Stigler (articulating what some economists have scorned as
“Chicago Marxism”) analyzed the politics of regulation in terms of
biased pluralism: the capture of regulators by the regulated. Charles
Lindblom outlined a number of ways—including the “privileged position”
of business—in which business firms and their associations influence
public policy. Thomas Ferguson has posited an “investment theory” of
politics in which “major investors”—especially representatives of
particular industrial sectors—fund political parties in order to get
policies that suit their economic interests. Fred Block’s
“neo-Polanyian” analysis emphasizes groups. Jacob Hacker and Paul
Pierson’s analysis of “winner-take-all-politics,” which emphasizes the
power of the finance industry, can be seen as a recent contribution to
the literature of biased pluralism. 18
Marxist and neo-Marxist theories of the capitalist state hold that economic classes—and
particularly the bourgeoisie, the owners of the means of
production—dominate policy making and cause the state to serve their
material interests. As the Communist Manifesto
put it, “The bourgeoisie has . . . conquered for itself, in the modern
representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the
modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the
whole bourgeoisie.” 19
We cannot precisely test the predictions of such theories, because we
lack good measures of policy preferences by economic class. (In Marxist
theory, neither income nor wealth accurately signals class position.) We
can note, however, that certain “instrumentalist” Marxist theories,
including the important version put forth by Ralph Miliband, make
predictions resembling those of theories of Biased Pluralism: that
interest groups and corporations representing “large scale business”
tend to prevail. 20
As to empirical evidence concerning interest groups, it is
well established that organized groups regularly lobby and fraternize
with public officials, move through revolving doors between public and
private employment, provide self-serving information to officials, draft
legislation, and spend a great deal of money on election campaigns. 21
Moreover, in harmony with theories of biased pluralism, the evidence
clearly indicates that most interest groups and lobbyists represent
business firms or professionals. Relatively few represent the poor or
even the economic interests of ordinary workers, particularly now that
the U.S. labor movement has become so weak. 22
But do interest groups actually influence policy? Numerous
case studies have detailed instances in which all but the most dedicated
skeptic is likely to perceive interest-group influence at work. A
leading classic remains Schattschneider’s analysis of the 1928 enactment
of the Smoot-Hawley tariff, an astounding orgy of pork-barrel politics. 23
Still, many quantitatively-oriented political scientists seem to ignore
or dismiss such non-quantitative evidence. There have also been some
efforts (particularly during the Cold War era, when unflattering
depictions of U.S. politics may have been thought unpatriotic) to
demonstrate that interest groups have no influence on policy at all.
Raymond Bauer, Ithiel Pool, and Lewis Anthony Dexter argued that
business had little or no effect on the renewal of reciprocal trade
authority. Lester Milbrath, having conducted interviews with lobbyists
and members of Congress, rated lobbyists’ influence as very low. More
recently, Fred McChesney has made the ingenious argument that campaign
contributions from interest groups may not represent quid pro quo
bribery attempts by groups, but instead result from extortion by
politicians who threaten to harm the groups’ interests. 24
Very few studies have offered quantitative evidence
concerning the impact of interest groups based on a number of different
public policies. Important exceptions include the work of Mark Smith and
that of Frank Baumgartner, Jeffrey Berry, Marie Hojnacki, David
Kimball, and Beth Leech. 25
Mark Smith examined 2,364 “business unity” issues—over a
period of four decades—on which the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (arguably a
reasonable proxy for business groups as a whole, on this particular set
of issues where most businesses agreed) took a public stand for or
against. He then calculated six measures of the Chamber’s annual rate of
“success” at getting the action or inaction it favored from Congress. 26 The Chamber’s average success rate in terms of proportion of bills enacted or defeated appears to have been fairly high, 27
but Smith did not argue that such success necessarily demonstrates
influence. (A batting-average approach to influence would have to assume
that stand-taking is unrelated to expectations of success. Further, in
order to gauge business’s independent impact and avoid spurious results,
data on stands taken by other actors would need to be included as
well.) Instead, Smith devoted most of his effort to analyzing the
over-time correlates of high or low success, such as variations in the
public “mood” and in the partisan composition of Congress.
Frank Baumgartner and his colleagues, in their meticulous
examination of 98 cases of congressional policy making in which interest
groups were active, investigated whether the magnitude of group
resources that were deployed was related to outcomes across those cases.
In their multivariate analyses, Baumgartner et al. found a modest
tendency for policy outcomes to favor the side that enjoyed greater
resources (PAC contributions, lobbying expenditures, membership size,
etc.). 28
Prior to the availability of the data set that we analyze
here, no one we are aware of has succeeded at assessing interest-group
influence over a comprehensive set of issues, while taking into account
the impact of either the public at large or economic elites—let alone
analyzing all three types of potential influences simultaneously.
Testing Theoretical Predictions
What makes possible an empirical effort of this sort is the
existence of a unique data set, compiled over many years by one of us
(Gilens) for a different but related purpose: for estimating the
influence upon public policy of “affluent” citizens, poor citizens, and
those in the middle of the income distribution.
Gilens and a small army of research assistants 29
gathered data on a large, diverse set of policy cases: 1,779 instances
between 1981 and 2002 in which a national survey of the general public
asked a favor/oppose question about a proposed policy change. A total of
1,923 cases met four criteria: dichotomous pro/con responses,
specificity about policy, relevance to federal government decisions, and
categorical rather than conditional phrasing. Of those 1,923 original
cases, 1,779 cases also met the criteria of providing income breakdowns
for respondents, not involving a Constitutional amendment or a Supreme
Court ruling (which might entail a quite different policy-making
process), and involving a clear, as opposed to partial or ambiguous,
actual presence or absence of policy change. These 1,779 cases do not
constitute a sample from the universe of all possible policy
alternatives (this is hardly conceivable), but we see them as
particularly relevant to assessing the public’s influence on policy. The
included policies are not restricted to the narrow Washington “policy
agenda.” At the same time—since they were seen as worth asking poll
questions about—they tend to concern matters of relatively high
salience, about which it is plausible that average citizens may have
real opinions and may exert some political influence. 30
For each case, Gilens used the original survey data to
assess responses by income level. In order to cope with varying income
categories across surveys, he employed a quadratic logistic regression
technique to estimate the opinions of respondents at the tenth income
percentile (quite poor), the fiftieth percentile (median), and the
ninetieth percentile (fairly affluent). 31
Here we use these policy preference data to
measure—imperfectly, but, we believe, satisfactorily—two independent
variables posited as major influences upon policy making in the
theoretical traditions discussed above.
Policy preferences at the fiftieth income percentile—that is, the preferences of the median-income
survey respondent—work quite well as measures of the preferences of the
average citizen (or, more precisely, the median non-institutionalized
adult American), which are central to theories of Majoritarian Electoral
Democracy. 32
In all cases in which the relationship between income and preferences
is monotonic, and in all cases in which there is no systematic
relationship at all between the two, the preferences of the
median-income respondent are identical to those of the median-preference
respondent. In the remaining cases the two are very close to each
other. 33
We believe that the preferences of “affluent” Americans at
the ninetieth income percentile can usefully be taken as proxies for the
opinions of wealthy or very-high-income Americans, and can be used to
test the central predictions of Economic-Elite theories. To be sure,
people at the ninetieth income percentile are neither very rich nor very
elite; in 2012 dollars, Gilens’ “affluent” respondents received only
about $146,000 in annual household income. To the extent that their
policy preferences differ from those of average-income citizens,
however, we would argue that there are likely to be similar but bigger
differences between average-income citizens and the truly wealthy.
Some evidence for this proposition comes from the 2011 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. 34
Based on 13 policy-preference questions asked on this survey, the
preferences of the top 2 percent of income earners (a group that might
be thought “truly wealthy”) are much more highly correlated with the
preferences of the top 10 percent of earners than with the preferences
of the average survey respondent (r=.91 versus .69). 35
Thus, the views of our moderately high-income “affluent” respondents
appear to capture useful information about the views of the truly
wealthy.
In any case, the imprecision that results from use of our “affluent” proxy is likely to produce underestimates
of the impact of economic elites on policy making. If we find
substantial effects upon policy even when using this imperfect measure,
therefore, it will be reasonable to infer that the impact upon policy of
truly wealthy citizens is still greater. 36
In order to measure interest-group preferences and actions,
we would ideally like to use an index of the sort that Baumgartner and
his colleagues developed for their ninety-eight policy issues: an index
assessing the total resources brought to bear by all major interest
groups that took one side or the other on each of our 1,779 issues. But
it is not feasible to construct such an index for all our cases; this
would require roughly twenty times as much work as did the major effort
made by the Baumgartner research team on their cases. Fortunately,
however, Baumgartner et al. found that a simple proxy for their
index—the number of reputedly “powerful” interest groups (from among
groups appearing over the years in Fortune
magazine’s “Power 25” lists) that favored a given policy change, minus
the number that opposed it—correlated quite substantially in their cases
with the full interest-group index (r=0.73). 37
Gilens, using a modified version of this simple count of
the number of “powerful” interest groups favoring (minus those opposing)
each proposed policy change, developed a measure of Net Interest Group Alignment.
To the set of groups on the “Power 25” lists (which seemed to neglect
certain major business interests) he added ten key industries that had
reported the highest lobbying expenditures. (For the final list of
included industries and interest groups, refer to Appendix 1.) For each
of the 1,779 instances of proposed policy change, Gilens and his
assistants drew upon multiple sources to code all engaged interest
groups as “strongly favorable,” “somewhat favorable,” “somewhat
unfavorable,” or “strongly unfavorable” to the change. He then combined
the numbers of groups on each side of a given issue, weighting
“somewhat” favorable or somewhat unfavorable positions at half the
magnitude of “strongly” favorable or strongly unfavorable positions. In
order to allow for the likelihood of diminishing returns as the net
number of groups on a given side increases (an increase from 10 to 11
groups likely matters less than a jump from 1 to 2 does), he took the
logarithms of the number of pro groups and the number of con groups
before subtracting. Thus,
Net Interest-Group Alignment = ln(# Strongly Favor + [0.5 *
# Somewhat Favor] + 1) – ln(# Strongly Oppose + [0.5 * # Somewhat
Oppose] + 1). 38
We also report here results for comparable group alignment
indices that were computed separately for the mass-based and for the
business-oriented sets of groups listed in Appendix 1.
Our dependent variable is a measure of whether or not the
policy change proposed in each survey question was actually adopted
within four years after the question was asked. (It turns out that most
of the action occurred within two years). Of course there was nothing
easy about measuring the presence or absence of policy change for each
of 1,779 different cases; Gilens and his research assistants spent many
hours poring over news accounts, government data, Congressional Quarterly publications, academic papers and the like. 39
In order to test among our theoretical traditions, we begin
by considering all organized interest groups together, not
distinguishing between mass-based and business-oriented groups. Within a
single statistical model, we estimate the independent impact upon our
dependent variable (policy change) of each of three independent
variables: the average citizen’s policy preferences (preferences at the
fiftieth income percentile); the policy preferences of economic elites
(measured by policy preferences at the ninetieth income percentile); and
the stands of interest groups (the Net Interest-Group Alignment Index).
Later, in order to distinguish clearly between Majoritarian
Pluralism and Biased Pluralism, we will use two separate measures of
net interest-group alignment, one involving only mass-based interest
groups and the other limited to business and professional groups. The
main hypotheses of interest, summarized in table 1, follow fairly straightforwardly from our discussion of our four ideal types of theory.
Table 1 Theoretical predictions concerning the independent influence of sets of actors upon policy outcomes
n = little or no independent influence
y = some independent influence
Y = substantial independent influence
In their pure form, theories of Majoritarian Electoral
Democracy (for example, rational models of electoral competition that
include no societal actors other than average citizens), predict that
the influence upon policy of average citizens is positive, significant,
and substantial, while the influence of other actors is not.
Theories of Economic-Elite Domination predict positive,
significant, and substantial influence upon policy by economic elites.
Most such theories allow for some (though not much) independent
influence by average citizens, e.g., on non-economic social issues. Many
also allow for some independent influence by business interest
groups—and therefore probably by interest groups taken as a whole—though
their emphasis is on wealthy individuals.
In general, theories of interest-group pluralism predict
that only organized interest groups will have positive, significant, and
substantial effects upon public policy. Influence proceeds from groups,
not from wealthy (or other) individuals. Depending upon the type of
pluralist theory, average citizens may or may not be well represented
through organized groups, but they do not have a great deal of
independent influence on their own.
Theories of Majoritarian Pluralism predict that the stands
of organized interest groups, all taken together, rather faithfully
represent (that is, are positively and substantially correlated with)
the preferences of average citizens. But since most political influence
proceeds through groups, a multivariate analysis
that includes both interest-group alignments and citizens’ preferences
should show far more independent influence by the groups than the
citizens. Truman’s idea of “potential groups” does, however, leave room
for some direct influence by average citizens.
Theories of Biased Pluralism, too, see organized interest
groups as having much more influence than average citizens or individual
economic elites. But they predict that business-oriented groups play
the major role.
Recognizing the complexity of the political world, we must
also acknowledge the possibility that more than one of these theoretical
traditions has some truth to it: that several—even all—of our sets of
actors may have substantial, positive, independent influence on public
policy. And we must consider the null hypothesis that none of these theoretical traditions correctly describes even part of what goes on in American politics.
Influence upon Policy of Average Citizens, Economic Elites, and Interest Groups
Before we proceed further, it is important to note that
even if one of our predictor variables is found (when controlling for
the others) to have no independent impact on policy at all, it does not
follow that the actors whose preferences are reflected by that
variable—average citizens, economic elites, or organized interest groups
of one sort or another—always “lose” in policy decisions. Policy making
is not necessarily a zero-sum game among these actors. When one set of
actors wins, others may win as well, if their preferences are positively
correlated with each other.
It turns out, in fact, that the preferences of average
citizens are positively and fairly highly correlated, across issues,
with the preferences of economic elites (refer to table 2).
Rather often, average citizens and affluent citizens (our proxy for
economic elites) want the same things from government. This bivariate
correlation affects how we should interpret our later multivariate
findings in terms of “winners” and “losers.” It also suggests a reason
why serious scholars might keep adhering to both the Majoritarian
Electoral Democracy and the Economic-Elite Domination theoretical
traditions, even if one of them may be dead wrong in terms of causal
impact. Ordinary citizens, for example, might often be observed to “win”
(that is, to get their preferred policy outcomes) even if they had no
independent effect whatsoever on policy making, if elites (with whom
they often agree) actually prevail.
Table 2 Correlations among independent variables
*** p<.001; n=1779.
Note: Entries are correlation coefficients corrected for measurement error as explained in Appendix 2.
But net interest-group stands are not
substantially correlated with the preferences of average citizens.
Taking all interest groups together, the index of net interest-group
alignment correlates only a non-significant .04 with average citizens’
preferences! (Refer to table 2.)
This casts grave doubt on David Truman’s and others’ argument that
organized interest groups tend to do a good job of representing the
population as a whole. Indeed, as table 2
indicates, even the net alignments of the groups we have categorized as
“mass-based” correlate with average citizens’ preferences only at the
very modest (though statistically significant) level of .12.
Some particular U.S. membership organizations—especially
the AARP and labor unions—do tend to favor the same policies as average
citizens. But other membership groups take stands that are unrelated
(pro-life and pro-choice groups) or negatively related (gun owners) to
what the average American wants. 40
Some membership groups may reflect the views of corporate backers or
their most affluent constituents. Others focus on issues on which the
public is fairly evenly divided. Whatever the reasons, all mass-based
groups taken together simply do not add up, in aggregate, to good
representatives of the citizenry as a whole. Business-oriented groups do
even worse, with a modest negative over-all correlation of -.10.
Nor do we find an association between the preferences of
economic elites and the alignments of either mass-based or
business-oriented groups. The latter finding, which surprised us, may
reflect profit-making motives among businesses as contrasted with
broader ideological views among elite individuals. For example, economic
elites tend to prefer lower levels of government spending on
practically everything, while business groups and specific industries
frequently lobby for spending in areas from which they stand to gain.
Thus pharmaceutical, hospital, insurance, and medical organizations have
lobbied for more spending on health care; defense contractors for
weapons systems; the American Farm Bureau for agricultural subsidies,
and so on.
Initial Tests of Influences on Policy Making
The first three columns of table 3 report bivariate
results, in which each of three independent variables (taking all
interest groups together, for now) is modeled separately as the sole
predictor of policy change. Just as previous literature suggests, each
of three broad theoretical traditions—Majoritarian Electoral Democracy,
Economic-Elite Domination, and interest-group pluralism—seems to gain
support. When taken separately, each independent variable—the
preferences of average citizens, the preferences of economic elites, and
the net alignments of organized interest groups—is strongly,
positively, and quite significantly related to policy change. Little
wonder that each theoretical tradition has its strong adherents.
Table 3 Policy outcomes and the policy preferences of average citizens, economic elites, and interest groups
***p<.001
Note: All predictors are scaled to range from 0 to 1. The
dependent variable is the policy outcome, coded 1 if the proposed policy
change took place within four years of the survey date and 0 if it did
not. Predictors are the logits of the imputed percent of respondents at
the fiftieth (“average citizens”) or ninetieth (“economic elites”)
income percentile that favor the proposed policy change, and the Net
Interest-Group Alignment Index described in the text. Standard errors
are asymptotically distribution-free, and all analyses reflect estimated
measurement error in the predictors, as described in Appendix 2. The
standardized coefficients for model 4 in this table are .01, .21, and
.16 for average citizens, economic elites, and interest groups,
respectively. N=1,779.
But the picture changes markedly when all three independent
variables are included in the multivariate Model 4 and are tested
against each other. The estimated impact of average citizens’
preferences drops precipitously, to a non-significant, near-zero level.
Clearly the median citizen or “median voter” at the heart of theories of
Majoritarian Electoral Democracy does not do well when put up against
economic elites and organized interest groups.
The chief predictions of
pure theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy can be decisively
rejected. Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all.
By contrast, economic elites are estimated to have a quite
substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy. This does
not mean that theories of Economic-Elite Domination are wholly upheld,
since our results indicate that individual elites must share their
policy influence with organized interest groups. Still, economic elites
stand out as quite influential—more so than any other set of actors
studied here—in the making of U.S. public policy.
Similarly, organized interest groups (all taken together,
for now) are found to have substantial independent influence on policy.
Again, the predictions of pure theories of interest-group pluralism are
not wholly upheld, since organized interest groups must share influence
with economically-elite individuals. But interest-group alignments are
estimated to have a large, positive, highly significant impact upon
public policy.
These results suggest that reality is best captured by
mixed theories in which both individual economic elites and organized
interest groups (including corporations, largely owned and controlled by
wealthy elites) play a substantial part in affecting public policy, but
the general public has little or no independent influence.
The rather low explanatory power of all three independent
variables taken together (with an R-squared of just .074 in Model 4) may
partly result from the limitations of our proxy measures, particularly
with respect to economic elites (since our “affluent” proxy is
admittedly imperfect) and perhaps with respect to interest groups (since
only a small fraction of politically-active groups are included in our
measure). Again, the implication of these limitations in our data is
that interest groups and economic elites actually wield more
policy influence than our estimates indicate.
But it is also possible
that there may exist important explanatory factors outside the three
theoretical traditions addressed in this analysis. Or there may be a
great deal of idiosyncrasy in policy outputs, or variation across kinds
of issues, that would be difficult for any general model to capture.
With our present data we cannot tell.
The magnitudes of the coefficients reported in table 3
are difficult to interpret because of our transformations of the
independent variables. A helpful way to assess the relative influence of
each set of actors is to compare how the predicted probability of
policy change alters when moving from one point to another on their
distributions of policy dispositions, while holding other actors’
preferences constant at their neutral points (50 percent favorable for
average citizens and for economic elites, and a net interest-group
alignment score of 0). These changing probabilities, based on the
coefficients in model 4 of table 3, are line-graphed in figure 1 along with bar graphs of the underlying preference distributions.
Figure 1 Predicted probability
of policy adoption (dark lines, left axes) by policy disposition; the
distribution of preferences (gray columns, right axes)
Clearly, when one holds constant net interest-group
alignments and the preferences of affluent Americans, it makes very
little difference what the general public thinks. The probability of
policy change is nearly the same (around 0.3) whether a tiny minority or
a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change
(refer to the top panel of figure 1).
By contrast—again with other actors held constant—a
proposed policy change with low support among economically-elite
Americans (one out of five in favor) is adopted only about 18 percent of
the time, while a proposed change with high support (four out of five
in favor) is adopted about 45 percent of the time.
Similarly, when
support for policy change is low among interest groups (with five groups
strongly opposed and none in favor) the probability of that policy
change occurring is only .16, but the probability rises to .47 when
interest groups are strongly favorable (refer to the bottom two panels
of figure 1). 41
When both interest groups and affluent Americans oppose a
policy it has an even lower likelihood of being adopted (these proposed
policies consist primarily of tax increases). At the other extreme, high
levels of support among both interest groups and affluent Americans
increases the probability of adopting a policy change, but a strong
status quo bias remains evident. Policies with strong support (as
defined above) among both groups are only adopted about 56 percent of
the time (strongly favored policies in our data set that failed include
proposed cuts in taxes, increases in tax exemptions, increased
educational spending for K–12, college support, and proposals during the
Clinton administration to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare).
Majoritarian Electoral Democracy
What are we to make of findings that seem to go against
volumes of persuasive theorizing and much quantitative research, by
asserting that the average citizen or the “median voter” has little or
no independent influence on public policy?
As noted, our evidence does not
indicate that in U.S. policy making the average citizen always loses
out. Since the preferences of ordinary citizens tend to be positively
correlated with the preferences of economic elites, ordinary citizens
often win the policies they want, even if they are more or less
coincidental beneficiaries rather than causes of the victory. There is
not necessarily any contradiction at all between our findings and past
bivariate findings of a roughly two-thirds correspondence between actual
policy and the wishes of the general public, or of a close
correspondence between the liberal/conservative “mood” of the public and
changes in policy making. 42
Our main point concerns causal inference: if interpreted in terms of
actual causal impact, the prior findings appear to be largely or wholly
spurious.
Further, the issues about which economic elites and
ordinary citizens disagree reflect important matters, including many
aspects of trade restrictions, tax policy, corporate regulation,
abortion, and school prayer, so that the resulting political losses by
ordinary citizens are not trivial. Moreover, we must remember that in
our analyses the preferences of the affluent are serving as proxies for
those of truly wealthy Americans, who may well have more political clout
than the affluent, and who tend to have policy preferences that differ
more markedly from those of the average citizens. Thus even rather
slight measured differences between preferences of the affluent and the
median citizen may signal situations in which economic-elites want
something quite different from most Americans and they generally get
their way.
A final point: Even in a bivariate, descriptive sense, our
evidence indicates that the responsiveness of the U.S. political system
when the general public wants government action
is severely limited. Because of the impediments to majority rule that
were deliberately built into the U.S. political system—federalism,
separation of powers, bicameralism—together with further impediments due
to anti-majoritarian congressional rules and procedures, the system has
a substantial status quo bias. Thus when popular majorities favor the
status quo, opposing a given policy change, they are likely to get their
way; but when a majority—even a very large majority—of the public
favors change, it is not likely to get what it wants. In our 1,779
policy cases, narrow pro-change majorities of the public got the policy
changes they wanted only about 30 percent of the time. More strikingly,
even overwhelmingly large pro-change majorities, with 80 percent of the
public favoring a policy change, got that change only about 43 percent
of the time.
In any case, normative advocates of populistic democracy
may not be enthusiastic about democracy by coincidence, in which
ordinary citizens get what they want from government only when they
happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling
the shots. When push comes to shove, actual influence matters.
Economic Elites
Economic-Elite Domination theories do rather well in our
analysis, even though our findings probably understate the political
influence of elites. Our measure of the preferences of wealthy or elite
Americans—though useful, and the best we could generate for a large set
of policy cases—is probably less consistent with the relevant
preferences than are our measures of the views of ordinary citizens or
the alignments of engaged interest groups. Yet we found substantial
estimated effects even when using this imperfect measure. The real-world
impact of elites upon public policy may be still greater.
What we cannot do with these data is distinguish
definitively among different versions of elite theories. We cannot be
sure whether we are capturing the political influence of the wealthiest
Americans (the top 1 percent of wealth-holders? the top one-tenth of 1
percent?), or, conceivably, the less affluent but more numerous citizens
around the ninetieth income percentile whose preferences are directly
gauged by our measure.
In any case, we need to reiterate that our data concern economic
elites. Income and wealth tend to be positively correlated with other
dimensions of elite status, such as high social standing and the
occupancy of high-level institutional positions, but they are not the
same thing. We cannot say anything directly about the non-economic
aspects of certain elite theories, especially those that emphasize
actors who may not be highly paid, such as public officials and
political party activists.
Organized Interest Groups
Our findings of substantial influence by interest groups is
particularly striking because little or no previous research has been
able to estimate the extent of group influence while controlling for the
preferences of other key non-governmental actors. Our evidence clearly
indicates that—controlling for the influence of both the average citizen
and economic elites—organized interest groups have a very substantial
independent impact upon public policy. Theories of interest-group
pluralism gain a strong measure of empirical support.
Here, too, the imperfections of our measure of
interest-group alignment (though probably less severe than in the case
of economically-elite individuals) suggest, a fortiori,
that the actual influence of organized groups may be even greater than
we have found. If we had data on the activity of the thousands of groups
not included in our net interest-group alignment measure, we might find
many cases in which a group (perhaps unopposed by any other groups) got
its way. This might be particularly true of narrow issues like special
tax breaks or subsidies aimed at just one or two business firms, which
are underrepresented in our set of relatively high-salience policies.
(Our data set includes only policies thought to be important enough for a
national opinion survey to ask a question about it.)
An important feature of interest group influence is that it is often deployed against
proposed policy changes. On the 1,357 proposed policy changes for which
at least one interest group was coded as favoring or opposing change,
in only 36 percent of the cases did most groups favor change, while in
55 percent of the cases most groups opposed change. (The remaining cases
involved equal numbers for and against.) 43
Distinguishing between Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism
Can we say anything further about whether processes of
interest-group influence more closely resemble Truman-like, broadly
representative Majoritarian Pluralism, or Schattschneider-style “Biased”
Pluralism, in which business interests, professional associations, and
corporations play the dominant part?
We have already reported several findings that cast serious
doubt upon Majoritarian Pluralism. If the net results of interest-group
struggle were to help average citizens get their way—with organized
groups perhaps representing citizens more effectively than
politically-inattentive Americans could do for themselves—we would
expect that the net alignment of interest groups would be positively and
strongly correlated with the policy preferences of the average citizen.
But we know from table 2
that they are not in fact significantly correlated at all.
Interest-group alignments are almost totally unrelated to the
preferences of average citizens. Moreover, there is no indication that
officials’ anticipation of reactions from “potential groups” brings
policies in line with what citizens want. 44
Empirical support for Majoritarian Pluralism looks very shaky, indeed.
We also know that the composition of the U.S. interest-group universe is
heavily tilted toward corporations and business and professional
associations. 45 This fact certainly points toward Biased rather than Majoritarian Pluralism.
To go a step further, theories of Majoritarian Pluralism
predict relatively more independent influence upon policy by mass-based
interest groups than do theories of Biased Pluralism. It may be useful,
therefore, to distinguish between mass-based and business-oriented
interest groups and to investigate how much policy influence each group
actually has.
Accordingly, we computed separate
net-interest-group-alignment indices for business-oriented and for
mass-based groups (refer to Appendix 1 for lists of each) and included
both of them in a new multivariate analysis, along with the preferences
of average citizens and economic elites—dropping our previous measure of
the net alignment of all interest groups.
The results of this analysis are given in table 4.
Clearly the predictions of Biased Pluralism theories fare substantially
better than those of Majoritarian Pluralism theories. The influence
coefficients for both mass-based and business-oriented interest groups
are positive and highly significant statistically, but the coefficient
for business groups is nearly twice as large as that for the mass
groups. Moreover, when we restricted this same analysis to the smaller
set of issues upon which both types of groups took positions—that is,
when we considered only cases in which business-based and mass-based
interest groups were directly engaged with each other—the contrast
between the estimated impact of the two types of groups was even
greater. 46
Table 4 The separate policy impact of business-oriented and mass-based interest groups
***p<.001
Note: All predictors are scaled to range from 0 to 1. The
dependent variable is the policy outcome, coded 1 if the proposed policy
change took place within four years of the survey date and 0 if it did
not. Predictors are the logits of the imputed percent of respondents at
the fiftieth (“average citizens”) or ninetieth (“economic elites”)
income percentile that favor the proposed policy change, and the Net
Interest-Group Alignment Indices described in the text. Standard errors
are asymptotically distribution-free, and all analyses reflect estimated
measurement error in the predictors, as described in Appendix 2.
N=1,779.
The advantage of business-oriented groups in shaping policy
outcomes reflects their numerical advantage within the interest-group
universe in Washington, and also the infrequency with which business
groups are found simultaneously on both sides of a proposed policy
change. 47
Both these factors (numerical dominance and relative cohesion) play a
part in the much stronger correlation of the overall interest-group
alignment index with business groups than with mass-oriented groups (.96
versus .47, table 2).
The importance of business groups’ numerical advantage is also revealed
when we rescale our measures of business and mass-oriented
interest-group alignments to reflect the differing number of groups in
each of these categories. Using this rescaled measure, a parallel
analysis to that in table 4 shows that on a group-for-group basis
the average individual business group and the average mass-oriented
group appears to be about equally influential. The greater total
influence of business groups in our analysis results chiefly from the
fact that more of them are generally engaged on each issue (roughly
twice as many, on average), not that a single business-oriented group
has more clout on average than a single mass-based group. 48
Taken as a whole, then, our evidence strongly indicates
that theories of Biased Pluralism are more descriptive of political
reality than are theories of Majoritarian Pluralism. It is simply not
the case that a host of diverse, broadly-based interest groups take
policy stands—and bring about actual policies—that reflect what the
general public wants. Interest groups as a whole do not seek the same
policies as average citizens do.
“Potential groups” do not fill the gap.
Relatively few mass-based interest groups are active, they do not (in
the aggregate) represent the public very well, and they have less
collective impact on policy than do business-oriented groups—whose
stands tend to be negatively related to the
preferences of average citizens. These business groups are far more
numerous and active; they spend much more money; and they tend to get
their way.
Table 4
also confirms our earlier findings about economic elites and median
voters. When the alignments of business-oriented and mass-based interest
groups are included separately in a multivariate model, average
citizens’ preferences continue to have essentially zero estimated impact
upon policy change, while economic elites are still estimated to have a
very large, positive, independent impact.
American Democracy?
Each of our four theoretical traditions (Majoritarian
Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, Majoritarian
Interest-Group Pluralism, and Biased Pluralism) emphasizes different
sets of actors as critical in determining U.S. policy outcomes, and each
tradition has engendered a large empirical literature that seems to
show a particular set of actors to be highly influential. Yet nearly all
the empirical evidence has been essentially bivariate. Until very
recently it has not been possible to test these theories against each
other in a systematic, quantitative fashion.
By directly pitting the predictions of ideal-type theories
against each other within a single statistical model (using a unique
data set that includes imperfect but useful measures of the key
independent variables for nearly two thousand policy issues), we have
been able to produce some striking findings. One is the nearly total
failure of “median voter” and other Majoritarian Electoral Democracy
theories. When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of
organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the
average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero,
statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.
The failure of theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy
is all the more striking because it goes against the likely effects of
the limitations of our data. The preferences of ordinary citizens were
measured more directly than our other independent variables, yet they
are estimated to have the least effect.
Nor
do organized interest groups substitute for direct citizen influence,
by embodying citizens’ will and ensuring that their wishes prevail in
the fashion postulated by theories of Majoritarian Pluralism. Interest
groups do have substantial independent impacts on policy, and a few
groups (particularly labor unions) represent average citizens’ views
reasonably well. But the interest-group system as a whole does not.
Overall, net interest-group alignments
are not significantly related to
the preferences of average citizens.
The net alignments of the most influential, business-oriented groups are negatively related to the average citizen’s wishes.
So existing interest groups do not serve effectively as transmission
belts for the wishes of the populace as a whole. “Potential groups” do
not take up the slack, either, since average citizens’ preferences have
little or no independent impact on policy after existing groups’ stands
are controlled for.
Furthermore, the preferences of economic elites (as
measured by our proxy, the preferences of “affluent” citizens) have far
more independent impact upon policy change than the preferences of
average citizens do. To be sure, this does not mean that ordinary
citizens always lose out; they fairly often get the policies they favor,
but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the
economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.
Of course our findings speak most directly to the “first
face” of power: the ability of actors to shape policy outcomes on
contested issues. But they also reflect—to some degree, at least—the
“second face” of power: the ability to shape the agenda of issues that
policy makers consider. The set of policy alternatives that we analyze
is considerably broader than the set discussed seriously by policy
makers or brought to a vote in Congress, and our alternatives are (on
average) more popular among the general public than among interest
groups. Thus the fate of these policies can reflect policy makers’
refusing to consider them rather than considering but rejecting them.
(From our data we cannot distinguish between the two.) Our results speak
less clearly to the “third face” of power: the ability of elites to
shape the public’s preferences. 49
We know that interest groups and policy makers themselves often devote
considerable effort to shaping opinion. If they are successful, this
might help explain the high correlation we find between elite and mass
preferences. But it cannot have greatly inflated our estimate of average
citizens’ influence on policy making, which is near zero.
What do our findings say about democracy in America? They
certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic”
democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to
the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our
findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at
least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.
When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with
organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the
strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when
fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally
do not get it.
A possible objection to populistic democracy is that
average citizens are inattentive to politics and ignorant about public
policy; why should we worry if their poorly-informed preferences do not
influence policy making? Perhaps economic elites and interest-group
leaders enjoy greater policy expertise than the average citizen does.
Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and
perhaps they seek the common good, rather than selfish ends, when
deciding which policies to support.
But we tend to doubt it. We believe instead
that—collectively—ordinary citizens generally know their own values and
interests pretty well, and that their expressed policy preferences are
worthy of respect. 50
Moreover, we are not so sure about the informational advantages of
elites. Yes, detailed policy knowledge tends to rise with income and
status. Surely wealthy Americans and corporate executives tend to know a
lot about tax and regulatory policies that directly affect them. But
how much do they know about the human impact of Social Security,
Medicare, food stamps, or unemployment insurance, none of which is
likely to be crucial to their own well-being?
Most important, we see no
reason to think that informational expertise is always accompanied by an
inclination to transcend one’s own interests or a determination to work
for the common good.
All in all, we believe that the public is likely to be a
more certain guardian of its own interests than any feasible
alternative.
Leaving aside the difficult issue of divergent interests
and motives, we would urge that the superior wisdom of economic elites
or organized interest groups should not simply be assumed. It should be
put to empirical test. New empirical research will be needed to pin down
precisely who knows how much, and what, about which public policies.
Our findings also point toward the need to learn more about
exactly which economic elites (the “merely affluent”? the top 1
percent? the top one-tenth of 1 percent?) have how much impact upon
public policy, and to what ends they wield their influence.
Similar
questions arise about the precise extent of influence of particular sets
of organized interest groups. And we need to know more about the policy
preferences and the political influence of various actors not
considered here, including political party activists, government
officials, and other non-economic elites. We hope that our work will
encourage further exploration of these issues.
Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous
studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest
that majorities of the American public actually have little influence
over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many
features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections,
freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested)
franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful
business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then
America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened."
Notes
1 Tocqueville 2000, 235–49.
Tocqueville focused on state governments, which he said “really
direct[ed]” American society; he noted that the Founders had imposed
limits on direct democracy in the federal government (235, n. 1.) Yet he
asserted in general terms that “[t]he laws of democracy . . . emanate
from the majority of all citizens”; 222.
2 Lincoln 1863. Dahl 1956,
ch. 2, defined “populistic democracy” in terms of pure majority rule
and traced its theoretical roots to Aristotle’s political equality,
Locke’s “majority power,” Rousseau’s “general will” of the majority, and
James Madison’s “republican principle,” and critically analyzed its
normative properties.
3 Hotelling 1929; Black 1948, 1958; Downs 1957.
In his full-information ch. 2, Downs offers a clever though somewhat
indeterminate non-dimensional version of the theory; in ch. 8 he
explicates a variant of Hotelling’s single-dimensional version. For
extensions to multiple dimensions see Davis, Hinich, and Ordeshook 1970.
May’s Theorem establishes that simple majority rule is the only
collective decision rule for choosing between two alternatives that
satisfies the Arrow-type democratic conditions of decisiveness,
anonymity, neutrality, and positive responsiveness to individuals’
preferences; May 1952.
5 A particularly trenchant critique is given in Ferguson 1995 (Appendix: “Deduced and Abandoned”).
8 Key 1961, ch. 11 and 472–76; Fiorina 1981; Zaller 2003.
A variant on this logic that focuses on the possibility of politicians
“pandering” to current preferences under certain conditions is given in
Canes-Wrone, Herron, and Shotts 2001. “Latent” preferences are the
collective policy preferences that citizens would derive from their
basic needs and values if they had accurate information about the future
unfolding of policy results. Such “latent” preferences are related to
the ideal, “authentic” preferences that some political theorists see as
superior to, and more worthy of governmental responsiveness than, the
policy preferences that citizens actually express. This can be seen as
adding normative appeal to an electoral-reward-and-punishment system of
democratic control. See Mansbridge 2003.
9 See Page and Shapiro 1992.
10 Mills 1959, ch. 12, especially 279. Robert Michels 2001, a founder of modern elite theory, emphasized positions of leadership in political parties.
Some of Theda Skocpol’s early work (e.g., Skocpol and Finegold 1982) can be seen as based on a state-centric elite theory that emphasizes public officials. Beginning with Protecting Soldiers and Mothers
(1992), however, Skocpol’s analyses of American politics have paid more
attention to non-state elites, social movements, organized interest
groups, and the preferences of the general public. Thus Skocpol’s work,
like that of a number of other important scholars of American politics
(e.g., Katznelson 2013), does not fit neatly into our simple theoretical categories.
The boundary between elite theories that focus on
economically-elite individuals, and interest group theories that focus
on organized corporate interests (discussed later), is not always a
sharp one. Here we treat most theories that emphasize corporate
organizations or industrial sectors (e.g., Block 2007, Ferguson 1995)
as primarily constituting “interest group” rather than elite theories.
We categorize self-identified elite theorists like Domhoff as such even
if they emphasize business elites and treat corporate organizations as
important mechanisms of influence. Winters 2011 may come closest to an exclusive focus on wealthy individuals rather than organizations.
One might argue that the economic classes
central to classical Marxist theories amount to “economic elites.” But
Marxist theorists see class position as only imperfectly related to
wealth or income, and their focus on ownership of the means of
production suggests that business firms and business associations may be
the key political actors. Hence we will discuss these theories in
connection with corporations and organized interest groups, noting the
kinship of “instrumentalist” Marxist theories to theories of biased
pluralism.
12 The term “interest group”
tends to evoke images of membership groups like the League of Women
Voters or the National Rifle Association, but many politically important
“groups” are in fact business corporations.
13 Hamilton, Madison, and Jay 1961, 77–84.
16 Olson 1965.
19 Marx and Engels 1972. This English-language text comes from the 1888 publication edited by Engels.
20 Miliband 1969, ch. 6. Fred Block (1977)
makes a critical distinction between “instrumentalist” Marxist theories
like Miliband’s, in which politically conscious members of ruling class
use their economic resources to shape state action in their own
material interests, and “structural” theories, in which the capitalist
economic system itself tends to shape state policies and the preferences
of its citizens—including workers, who are compelled to accept low
wages and high capitalist profits for the sake of future investment and
growth. On alternative Marxist theories of power, see also Isaac 1987b. For a formalized structural Marxist theory, see Przeworski and Wallerstein 1982.
21 Again, our data can do little to distinguish among these or other mechanisms of political influence. We focus on possible sources of influence among individuals and groups in society.
22 Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2012, ch. 10–14, especially 321, 329, 356.
23 Schattschneider 1935.
26 Smith 2000, ch. 3.
27 Numerical success rates are not reported in Smith 2000,
but the “enactment scorecard” line in figure 4.1 (83) appears to show
Chamber success on 60 percent or more of the bills in most years, with
very substantial variation from year to year.
28 Baumgartner et al. 2009,
233, 235. These multivariate results may be biased downwards because
the regressions include as independent variables congressional and
executive branch officials’ active support for (or opposition to) policy
changes. Since officials’ behavior may well have been influenced by the
interest groups themselves, the inclusion of these predictors restricts
the estimates of group influence to direct effects, excluding any indirect impact that was channeled through interest groups’ influence over officials.
On the other hand, the omission of other influential actors
from the analysis could (if their preferences were positively
correlated with those of interest groups) produce spuriously inflated
estimates of interest-group influence. A further complexity in assessing
interest-group influence involves policy cases in which groups take no
stand at all, which are not included in the analysis by either Smith or
Baumgartner et al. Inclusion of no-stand cases would be necessary if one
sought to assess the extent to which groups affect over-all policy
results—though not for assessing the extent of group influence in the
cases where influence attempts are actually made.
29 Appreciation for their fine
work in assisting with the colossal task of collecting and coding these
data goes to Marty Cohen, Jason Conwell, Andrea Vanacore, and Mark West
at UCLA, and Oleg Bespalov, Daniel Cassino, Kevin Collins, Shana
Gadarian, Raymond Hicks, and Lee Shaker at Princeton.
30 Arguments for the normative and empirical relevance of the “survey agenda” are discussed in Gilens 2012,
50–56. Note that if (as we find) the public has little or no influence
on our issues, which tilt toward high salience, it is unlikely that the
public has much influence on more technical or obscure matters.
31 In 2012, the tenth percentile
of household income was about $12,200, the fiftieth percentile about
$51,000, and the ninetieth percentile about $146,000 (U.S. Census
Bureau, 2013). For further detail on these data, see Gilens 2012, 57–66.
32 Of course the average
(median) citizen is not identical to the eligible or actual “median
voter.” But the generally small magnitude of differences between the
policy preferences of voters and those of all citizens (Wolfinger and
Rosenstone 1980, 109–114; Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2012,
120–21) suggests that our measure captures the spirit of median voter
theories. To the extent that differences exist, we consider the average
citizen to be of greater normative—though less empirical—importance.
33 To make an approximate
assessment of the fit between the preferences of the median-preference
respondent and those of the median-income respondent we calculated the
median preference within each of five income groups (at the tenth,
thirtieth, fiftieth, seventieth, and ninetieth percentiles). For
example, if, on a particular non-monotonic item, the five income groups
had imputed median preferences of .50, .60, .70 .65 and .55 (for the
tenth to ninetieth income percentiles, respectively), then the estimated
over-all median preference would be .60 (in this case equaling the
preference at the thirtieth income percentile). In most cases the
over-all median preference is the same as the median income (fiftieth
percentile) preference. When it is not, the preference differences
across income levels tend to be small. Using this technique, the median
over-all preferences and the median-income preferences track each other
very closely: r=.997.
34 This study is one of the few
surveys that meets the two criteria of having a sufficiently large
sample size (n=20,150) and a high enough top-coded income category to
provide information on the policy preferences of very affluent
Americans.
35 Correlations of the policy
preferences of the top 2 percent with those of the top 10 percent are
based on the 76 CCES respondents who reported at least $350,000 in
family income. Using the 179 CCES respondents who reported at least
$250,000 (roughly the top 4.5 percent of the income distribution), the
corresponding correlations are .97 and .76.
Some corroborating evidence comes from a comparison of the
Survey of Economically Successful Americans (Page, Bartels, and
Seawright 2013), based on a local sample of the wealthiest 1 percent or 2 percent of Americans, and the Inequality Survey (Page and Jacobs 2009),
which was based on a representative sample of the American public.
Eight policy-preference questions that were included on both surveys
showed that the preferences of the top 25 percent of income earners
generally fell about half way between those of the average citizen and
those of the wealthy. For similar findings concerning the policy
preferences of the top 4 percent or so of income earners, see Page and
Hennessy 2008.
36 We distinguish conceptually
between two sorts of deficiencies in our measures: flaws that affect the
relationship between our indictors and their underlying concepts (such
as the random and correlated measurement errors we discuss in the
appendix), and flaws that arise from the imperfect fit between those
concepts and the characteristics we would prefer to measure. For
example, the adjustments described in the appendix help us to improve
our estimates of the preferences of Americans at the ninetieth income
percentile, but they cannot help to make those estimates any more
accurate as indicators of the preferences of the truly rich Americans
whose views we would prefer to include in our models.
37 Baumgartner et al. 2009,
225. We believe that our measure of net interest group alignment
(described later) is actually superior to the Fortune 25 proxy examined
by Baumgartner et al. because it includes industries that do not lobby
through centralized trade organizations, it is nonlinear in net number
of groups, and it reflects the extent to which a particular issue is
central to the concerns of an interest group or industry.
38 For more detail on the Index of Net Interest Group Alignment, see Gilens 2012, 127–30.
39 On the measurement of policy change, see Gilens 2012 (60) and note 18 (284).
40 For correlations of individual groups’ positions with average citizens’ preferences see Gilens 2012, 156–57.
41 These particular values for
low and high levels of support among affluent Americans and interest
groups were chosen because about 15 percent of all proposed policy
changes generated either less than 20 percent or more than 80 percent
support among the affluent, and about fifteen percent of all proposed
changes on which interests groups took a position generated a raw net
interest group score of either more than five groups strongly in favor
or more than five groups strongly opposed (counting “somewhat” favorable
or opposed as one-half of a group).
43 Perhaps counterintuitively, it turns out that business groups tilted somewhat less
toward opposing proposed changes (33 percent opposed, 26 percent in
favor) than mass-based groups did (38 percent opposed, 20 percent in
favor.)
44 Even if existing organized
groups did not reflect the wishes of average citizens, officials’
anticipated reactions to unformed “potential groups” might in theory
provide some representation for average citizens, as David Truman argued
they do. But our table 3
finding of negligible independent influence by average citizens when
existing organized interest groups’ positions are controlled for, leaves
little room for potential groups (and officials’ anticipation of them)
to advance the preferences of ordinary citizens.
45 Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2012, ch. 10–14, especially 321, 329, 356.
46 For the 369 out of 1,779
cases in which both business-based and mass-based interest groups took a
stand, the coefficients are just .09 (n.s.) for mass groups but .48**
(p<.001) for business groups.
47 For those proposed policy
changes on which at least one business-oriented group took a position,
another business-oriented group was found on the opposite side less than
5 percent of the time. Interestingly, mass-based groups were somewhat
more likely to take stands on both sides of an issue, for example
pro-life and pro-choice groups on abortion, or the AARP which opposed
the Clinton health reform plan and the AFL-CIO that favored it.
48 For the analysis in table 4,
both the business and mass interest group indices were scaled to run
from 0 to 1. When we rescaled these indices to reflect the differing
numbers of business and mass-based groups engaged on each issue, the
standard deviation of the business alignment index was .158 and the
mass-oriented index .096; their associations with policy outcomes
(analogous to those shown in table 4) were almost identical, at .38 (p<.01) and .40 (p<.001), respectively.
Supplementary Materials
-
Business- and Mass-Based Interest-Groups Included in Net Group Alignment Indices
-
Correcting for Measurement Error
-
Table A1. Ordinary least squares analysis parallel to the structural equation model presented in table 3.
-
Data/code for replicating results http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1537592714001595″
.........
No comments:
Post a Comment