Whose policies do people prefer?
So if Democratic policies seem to produce so much better results for the masses than Republican policies, then why don't those Democratic economic policies dominate public opinion?
Actually, in some ways they do. Polling done in 2002 and 2004 suggested that 56% of Americans believe that the rich pay less in taxes than they should, whereas only 13% believe the rich pay too much. In contrast, 8% of Americans believe that the poor pay less in taxes than they should.1 This falls in line with the Democrats’ policy of shifting the tax burden towards those at the top of the economic food chain, and is in opposition to the Republicans’ history of repeatedly lowering taxes on the rich.
At the same time, public support for an increase in the minimum wage has remained above 60% for over 40 years, with many polls showing support as high as 85%.2 Once again, this is in full agreement with consistent Democratic policies and in diametric opposition to the Republican platform.
Unfortunately, voters are not always able to match these goals to actual policy.
While the overriding effects of the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 were to further reduce the tax burden for those wealthy taxpayers that most people agreed were paying too little, public opinion was generally in favor of the measures. This was likely due to the effort to paint the policies as a tax cut for “everybody”. Unfortunately, this was nowhere near the truth. For example, the average tax cut in 2001 for a person in the top 1% of the income spectrum was 100 times higher than the average break for those in the bottom 60%, and by 2010 over half of the total savings will be going to those in the top 1%.3
Even when low-income voters aren't decieved about legislation, legislators have shown a tepid response to public opinion on that end of the economic scale. Larry Bartels examined the results of voter polls in all 50 states after the Senate elections of 1988, 1990, and 1992, and compared them to the actual voting records of each state’s corresponding Senators from 1989 through 1994.4 He found that when looking at each Democratic senator, the opinions of the lowest 30% of wage-earners in their state (all those who earned less than $30,000/year in 2005 dollars) had no influence at all on the senator's actions. The opinions of the voters in their state in the upper 30% and middle 40% carried approximately equal weight. Republicans senators were even more slanted towards the wealthy, matching the views of the upper 30% of their constituency twice as much as the middle 40%, and once again not being influenced at all by the views of the bottom 30%.
On certain important issues, especially during the Bush administration, the imbalance was even worse. The votes of senators on a proposed minimum wage increase in 1989 perfectly reflected the views of the upper 30% of the voters in their respective states, with no weight at all given to the rest of the voters. On the 1991 proposal to extend and increase civil rights protections, senators gave a very small weight to the voters in the middle 40%, but once again almost perfectly matched the views of the upper 30% of their constituencies. In fact, there was not one significant bill during that first Bush administration in which the views of the richest 30% of the population did not dominate the rest of the population in determining the senators’ votes.
Bartels isn‘t isolated in finding this relationship between the decisions of politicians and the views of their wealthiest constituents. In a broader 2005 study on the policy preferences of U.S. citizens, Martin Gilens found that, “influence over actual policy outcomes appears to be reserved almost exclusively for those at the top of the income distribution.”5 The lack of response to the concerns of the majority of the population caused Gilens to add that, “representational biases of this magnitude call into question the very democratic character of our society.”
So why is this happening, and what do we do? It is true that lower-income Americans tend to vote less than higher-income Americans, but the difference is small enough (about 25%) that it could not account for an almost total focus on the upper classes.6 A somewhat greater gap exists between the rich and the poor in their knowledge of policy decisions and therefore their chances of mounting a response to specific legislation.7 But the most likely explanation is the significantly greater access that the upper classes have to elected officials and other power-brokers, and the enormous historical gap in campaign contributions between the rich and the poor.8 Politicians will not reflect the will of the people if they do not hear the will of the people, and they will most listen to those people who are providing them with the funding to continue their stay in power.
What are we to do? Stand in the gap and advocate for the poor. Speak out about their needs however you can, wherever you can, whenever you can. Let our politicians know what we stand for and where true justice lies. Educate the poor so that they are able to stand up for their own causes. Encourage Christian politicians to follow their faith rather than their sources of money. And never, ever let others use money and the power it brings to cloud our own judgment.
"We can have a democratic society or we can have great concentrated wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both."
- Louis Brandeis9
"What differentiates oligarchy and democracy is wealth or the lack of it. The essential point is that where the possession of political power is due to the possession of economic power or wealth, whether the number of persons be large or small, that is oligarchy, and when the unpropertied class have power, that is democracy."
- Aristotle10
"In a political system where nearly every adult may vote but where knowledge, wealth, social position, access to officials, and other resources are unequally distributed, who actually governs?"
- Robert Dahl11
"Unless formally restrained, the richest citizens [in the Italian republics] tended to use their privilege to molest fellow citizens with impunity and direct the workings of government toward their own benefit rather than toward that of the general citizenry...If a popular government or republic is not to veer dangerously toward an unaccountable oligarchy, natural or not, institutional affirmative action for common citizens is necessary."
- John McCormick12
All material in this post is inspired by Larry Bartels's book Unequal Democracy
[1] 2002 and 2004 National Election Study survey
[2] Roper Center‘s iPOLL archive
[3] "Year-by-Year Analysis of the Bush Tax Cuts Shows Growing Tilt to the Very Rich,” Citizens for Tax Justice, June 12, 2002, www.ctj.org
[4] Bartels, Larry M. 2002 “Economic Inequality and Political Representation.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston.
[5] Gilens, Martin. 2005 "Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness." Public Opinion Quarterly 69: 778-796.
[6] Senate Election Study. Conducted by the National Election Studies research team. http://www.umich.edu/~nes
[7] Bartels, Larry M. 2008 Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pg 277.
[8] Verba, Sidney, Kay Lehman Schlozman, and Henry E. Brady. 1995. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvad University Press, pgs 194, 565.
[9] Phillips, Kevin. 2002. Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. New York: Broadway Books, pg 418.
[10] Aristotle. Politics, T.A. Sinclair, trans. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1962), books II and III, 117.
[11] Dahl, Robert. 1961. Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pg 1.
[12] McCormick, John P. 2006 "Contain the Wealthy and Patrol the Magistrates: Restoring Elite Accountability to Popular Government." American Political Science Review 100: pgs 147, 161.
