PRINCETON – It is hardly news that the rich
have more political power than the poor, even in democratic countries where
everyone gets a single vote in elections. But two political scientists, Martin
Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University,
have recently produced some stark findings for the United States that have dramatic
implications for the functioning of democracy – in the US and elsewhere.
The authors’ research builds on prior work by
Gilens, who painstakingly collected public-opinion polls on nearly 2,000 policy
questions from 1981 to 2002. The pair then examined whether America’s federal
government adopted the policy in question within four years of the survey, and
tracked how closely the outcome matched the preferences of voters at different
points of the income distribution.
When viewed in isolation, the preferences of
the “average” voter – that is, a voter in the middle of the income distribution
– seem to have a strongly positive influence on the government’s ultimate
response. A policy that the average voter would like is significantly more
likely to be enacted.
But, as Gilens and Page note, this gives a
misleadingly upbeat impression of the representativeness of government
decisions. The preferences of the average voter and of economic elites are not
very different on most policy matters. For example, both groups of voters would
like to see a strong national defense and a healthy economy. A better test
would be to examine what the government does when the two groups have divergent
views.
To carry out that test, Gilens and Page ran a
horse race between the preferences of average voters and those of economic
elites – defined as individuals at the top tenth percentile of the income
distribution – to see which voters exert greater influence. They found that the
effect of the average voter drops to insignificant levels, while that of
economic elites remains substantial.
The implication is clear: when the elites’
interests differ from those of the rest of society, it is their views that
count – almost exclusively. (As Gilens and Page explain, we should think of the
preferences of the top 10% as a proxy for the views of the truly wealthy, say,
the top 1% – the genuine elite.)
Gilens and Page report similar results for
organized interest groups, which wield a powerful influence on policy
formation. As they point out, “it makes very little difference what the general
public thinks” once interest-group alignments and the preferences of affluent
Americans are taken into account.
These disheartening results raise an
important question: How do politicians who are unresponsive to the interests of
the vast majority of their constituents get elected and, more important, re-elected,
while doing the bidding mostly of the wealthiest individuals?
Part of the explanation may be that most
voters have a poor understanding of how the political system works and how it
is tilted in favor of the economic elite. As Gilens and Page emphasize, their
evidence does not imply that government policy makes the average citizen worse
off. Ordinary citizens often do get what they want, by virtue of the
fact that their preferences frequently are similar to those of the elite. This
correlation of the two groups’ preferences may make it difficult for voters to
discern politicians’ bias.
But another, more pernicious, part of the
answer may lie in the strategies to which political leaders resort in order to
get elected. A politician who represents the interests primarily of economic
elites has to find other means of appealing to the masses. Such an alternative
is provided by the politics of nationalism, sectarianism, and identity – a
politics based on cultural values and symbolism rather than bread-and-butter
interests. When politics is waged on these grounds, elections are won by those
who are most successful at “priming” our latent cultural and psychological
markers, not those who best represent our interests.
Karl Marx famously said that religion is “the opium of the people.” What he meant is
that religious sentiment could obscure the material deprivations that workers
and other exploited people experience in their daily lives.
In much of the same way, the rise of the
religious right and, with it, culture wars over “family values” and other
highly polarizing issues (for example, immigration) have served to insulate
American politics from the sharp rise in economic inequality since the late
1970s. As a result, conservatives have been able to retain power despite their
pursuit of economic and social policies that are inimical to the interests of
the middle and lower classes.
Identity politics is malignant because it
tends to draw boundaries around a privileged in-group and requires the
exclusion of outsiders – those of other countries, values, religions, or
ethnicities. This can be seen most clearly in illiberal democracies such as
Russia, Turkey, and Hungary. In order to solidify their electoral base, leaders
in these countries appeal heavily to national, cultural, and religious symbols.
In doing so, they typically inflame passions
against religious and ethnic minorities. For regimes that represent economic
elites (and are often corrupt to the core), it is a ploy that pays off
handsomely at the polls.
Widening inequality in the world’s advanced
and developing countries thus inflicts two blows against democratic politics.
Not only does it lead to greater disenfranchisement of the middle and lower
classes; it also fosters among the elite a poisonous politics of sectarianism.
Dani Rodrik is Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. He is the author of One Economics, Many Recipes: Globalization, Institutions, and Economic Growth and, most recently, The Globalization Paradox: Democracy and the Future of the World Economy
