Abstract
Low-income Americans are at a disadvantage when it comes to securing policies that would benefit them. There are two things that elected officials need, after all: money, so that they can finance their election campaigns, and votes, to win the contest. Poor people are unreliable campaign contributors, for the obvious reason, but they are unreliable voters, too, for a more complicated set of reasons. So is it any wonder that their needs are little attended to? American politics and policy making ignore poor and low-income Americans because, ordinarily, they can. This does not come as a revelation to even marginally attentive students of American politics, and has been a subject for scholars such as C. Wright Mills, William Domhoff, and E.E. Schattschneider (1960), who famously noted that ‘the flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent’. More recently, Larry Bartels (2008) offered evidence to support the proposition that elected officials are ‘utterly unresponsive’ to the needs of low-income Americans (while suggesting that class differences in voter turnout don’t explain much of the variance), while Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson (2010) synthesized decades’ worth of research to show just how economically unequal the United States has become of late and how unequal influence in the political system contributes to the decline. Into this mix now come Martin Gilens, with Affluence and Influence, and Kay Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry Brady, with The Unheavenly Chorus.
Gilens examines survey results across four decades to see how mass policy preferences compare to policies that were actually enacted into law (an improvement upon more common measures such as bills introduced in Congress or mentioned in speeches and other public statements of elected officials). He concludes that ‘under most circumstances, the preferences of the vast majority of Americans appear to have essentially no impact on which policies the government does or doesn’t adopt’ (p. 1). When these groups do win, Gilens argues, it is mostly when their preferences happen to coincide with the desires of the wealthy, or, less commonly, when they have strong interest-group allies (think the preservation of Social Security and Medicare against assaults, and the role of the AARP [American Association of Retired People]; or the expansion of the Medicare programme during the George W. Bush administration undertaken with the strong support of the pharmaceutical industry); and they are most likely to see results during Presidential election years (confirming decades of prior research), although even then the interests of wealthier Americans dominate. While there are important exceptions and caveats, lower-income Americans’ articulated preferences do better under Democratic regimes and the better-off do better under Republicans, although the differences are not nearly so great as many might think. Among the more interesting findings is the claim that weaker rather than stronger Congressional majorities might benefit the broader public because with strong majorities the parties have greater space to ignore outside pressure and public opinion; if their hold on power is tenuous, they must be more responsive. Indeed, it may be during periods of ‘gridlock’ that Congress is most responsive to broad-based desires, although policies enacted during those periods may be short-lived and more susceptive to erosion or repeal over time. This dominance of policy making by wealthier Americans is not, Gilens adds, because they are more knowledgeable about policy or that they care more about outcomes.
What this means for democracy is up for debate, depending upon whether you think the principal goal of a democratic political system is to reflect majority preference regardless of the wisdom or strength of that preference. This might be seen most clearly by pointing to Gilens’ claim that the George W. Bush regime was more responsive to mass preference than was Lyndon Johnson’s. This may be true, but if so, it is true in part because of successful Administration efforts to obscure the nature of ‘popular’ policies, ranging from regressive tax cuts to the invasion of Iraq. Even so, to discover – again – that the American political system consistently ignores the wishes of poor and low-income people, unless they happen to coincide with the wants of those with higher income and wealth, is dispiriting even if it is not surprising.
The implications for policy are perhaps more complicated. If policy more consistently reflected preferences, Gilens suggests, we would encounter a mixed bag of results, with reduced foreign aid and more conservative social policies (especially regarding abortion, public displays of religion, and gay rights), but a more progressive tax system, greater corporate regulation, and higher minimum wage and unemployment insurance benefits.
Schlozman, Verba, and Brady (SVB) examine political participation (‘voice’ in their language) rather than influence, but come to strikingly similar conclusions: ‘those who are not affluent and well educated are less likely to take part politically and are even less likely to be represented by the activity of organized interests’ (p. 5). This helps explain Gilens’ findings, to some extent: lower-income Americans are less likely to have their needs met by the American political system because they are not, for the most part, a part of that system. Their needs are not registered because their voices are not heard. They are not heard directly, as SVB demonstrate at length, because they vote less, contribute less money, volunteer less for campaigns, and communicate less with elected officials via letter or email; nor are they heard indirectly, as they also show, since organized interest groups are rarely fighting on their behalf, and they are unlikely to have lobbyists. This all matters even more than it may appear, since SVB argue that politicians do not seek to appease the median voter, as political scientists used to think, but are more likely to respond to the desires of political activists. And, as they observe, ‘the median voter, campaign worker, and campaign contributor [in either party] are more affluent than and less inclined to support income redistribution than is the median citizen’ (p. 261).
While some trends have gotten worse over the past few decades, there was never a golden age of full political participation, and lower-income, less educated Americans – especially if they were African American or among the immigrant groups singled out for disapprobation at any given time – have almost always been marginal influences on policy making. While neither book misleads on or ignores this point, it seems worth foregrounding more than they have. The United States has always been, at best, an approximation of an open democratic system, never a model, and despite the stories we have told to ourselves and the world about what it is to be America, we have had a remarkably rigid class structure. Even today, the US has lower levels of income and education mobility than does the UK, a nation that still nonetheless retains a vestigial monarchy.
SVB reach beyond Gilens’ purview by considering those instances in which marginalized groups have forced their way on to the policy-making agenda, recognizing that they have often done so outside the channels of ‘normal’ or ‘consensus’ politics via social movements and mass mobilizations: engagement in these activities is included (albeit sporadically) in data SVB draw on in their catalogue of political activities, and focused on in some depth in Chapter 15, although (and this is apt given the focus of the book) their concern is with recruitment and membership rather than how movements achieve power and exert influence. I asked above if it is any wonder that low-income Americans’ needs are so little attended to, but I might well have added: except perhaps in those moments when their frustration and anger is so great that it threatens order. This should not come as a surprise. It has long been a staple of radical critique to note that the American political system, via the Constitution itself, was designed to frustrate the ability of even a determined majority to exert its will, and that only in extraordinary moments would that will be able to turn the system to its own ends – these are the lessons of Madison’s Federalist Nos. 10 and 51. Thus, for all the imprecision of the claim, we still talk about the expansion of American social welfare policy as having occurred in the two ‘big bangs’ of the 1930s and 1960s, expansions of state power on behalf of poor and unemployed people and otherwise marginalized groups that are inexplicable without reference to the activities of (radical) social movements.
Democracy in the United States may well be in peril, as these powerfully smart and genuinely useful books suggest, but we should not conclude that that is necessarily anything all that new. And that, it seems to me, points to a more urgent set of questions: why does it always come as a surprise to realize how class-bound the US is and what forces need to be marshalled to put us on a path to a more open and democratic society?