America the Unequal

In a recent series of posts at The Monkey Cage, Princeton political science professor Martin Gilens discussed the effects of economic inequality on political outcomes. The key findings of his research are that income levels can predict Americans’ policy preferences on about one-half of the issues he studies, and that elected officials overwhelmingly listen to their higher-income constituents; indeed, they generally only pay attention to lower-income Americans at election time.

Gilens finds that wealthier Americans lean to the left on social issues (especially religiously-charged ones such as abortion) and to the right on economic issues. The issues on which rich and poor Americans agree include defence policy, environmental protection, and social issues less tied to religion (such as drugs, parental leave, and neo-liberal restructuring of welfare policy). The federal government is never as responsive to the policy preferences of lower-income groups as it is to those of higher-income ones, but the gap is lessened during closely-contested presidential election campaigns. (Note that he specifies presidential elections – midterms are decided by an older, whiter, and richer electorate.) Naturally, parties tend to the interests of the core supporters when they can, except when the threat of electoral defeat disciplines them into appealing to a broader base. However, this levelling doesn’t last, and the later years of a president’s term see the policy preferences of the elites rise again in importance.

The most striking part of Gilens’ findings is that the influence of wealthier Americans is not due to their education, civic awareness, work on campaigns, willingness to contact representatives, or more intense preferences about the issues. After controlling for these factors, they still have much more influence; politicians simply heed their concerns because of their money. A person in the ninetieth percentile in terms of income but only the tenth percentile in terms of education has the same influence on their representatives as someone in the fiftieth income percentile and the ninetieth education percentile. Likewise, turnout and work on political campaigns correlate with income levels, but political donations rise rapidly with increased income. All this suggests that efforts to reform American democracy by encouraging such things as voter registration, voter turnout, and fair redistricting are doomed to fail unless the question of money in politics is addressed head-on.

In his third post, Gilens makes perhaps the most important observation: that in modern-day American politics, money is increasingly more effective than other resources. He uses the example of television advertising, which requires more money and fewer warm bodies than, say, door-to-door canvassing. I would add that the decline of patronage has had a similar effect; without the lure of a government job afterwards, there are fewer rewards for participating in a political campaign, with the result that modern campaigns look less plebeian than those of previous eras. (Compare the rustic, backwoods feel of Andrew Jackson’s support with the iPad-using bourgeois hipster demographic which propelled Obama into office.) In both cases, the process has been helped along by the Supreme Court; its conservative wing has been hostile to campaign finance reform (eg. Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United) while its liberal wing dealt the final blows to old-school patronage politics in cases such as Elrod v. Burns (which barred the firing of political appointees for political reasons) and Rutan v. Republican Party of Illinois (which prevented officials from denying government contracts to companies which donated to their opponents). It is no wonder, then, that the class of people who fund the television ads and whose Ivy League-educated ‘best and brightest’ staff the campaigns and the permanent bureaucracy are the only Americans who matter to politicians.

Gilens’ work gels with that of Larry Bartels, who shows (in Unequal Democracy) that the votes of members of Congress reflect the policy preferences of the top one-third of income-earners. Another interesting analysis of what drives Americans’ political views is that of Bryan Caplan, a denizen of the über-libertarian economics faculty at George Mason University. Caplan (in his 2006 book The Myth of the Rational Voter) compares economists and non-economists, and after controlling for race, income, and ideology, finds that economists’ support for free market policies are merely a function of their superior knowledge of economics. To that end, he suggests various measures to increase their political influence: extra votes, an economic equivalent of the Supreme Court to strike down anti-free market legislation, and the delegation of fiscal policy decisions to the Fed. Where Caplan goes wrong is evident in his title – even if lower-income Americans support protectionist and welfare-statist economic policies at the ballot box once every four years, it is the policy preferences of their affluent compatriots which politicians heed in the intervening years.

Gilens’ findings paint a disturbing portrait of a nation increasingly in the grip of a narrow, plutocratic elite. But what can be done to make the United States government better reflect the policy preferences of the 99%, instead of those of the elites?

First, as Gilens suggests, sometimes needs to be done about the power of money in American politics. A constitutional amendment overturning the Supreme Court’s decisions in Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United is necessary, and should be followed up by a federal campaign finance scheme such as the ‘democracy vouchers’ proposed by Bruce Ackerman.

Second, in order to make warm bodies count for as much as cold hard cash, the spoils system should be revived. In the nineteenth century, it allowed ordinary Americans to hold offices that the Federalist/Whig gentry had tried to monopolise and treat as their personal property. At the state and local levels, patronage helped the Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Polish poor of America’s cities to capture a share of power, integrate into American society, and launch themselves into the middle class; its demise has prevented African-Americans and Latino/as from doing the same. The enthusiasm for a meritocratic civil service was historically driven by anglophile northeastern WASPs, who calculated (correctly) that government jobs would come to be dominated by themselves. Apart from positions that are merely clerical or administrative in nature, all civilian federal employees should be political appointees subject to dismissal on political grounds. The proposal advanced in the 1840s and 1850s by future President Andrew Johnson, that they be subject to an eight-year term limit, might also be adopted. Parties should be able to collect a percentage of their appointees’ salaries, lessening the need to go cap-in-hand to hedge fund billionaires for funding.

Third, the structure of the federal government could be reformed to promote a less plutocratic politics. If elections make politicians more responsive to the policy preferences of lower-income Americans, let’s have more elections and more elective offices. Some ideas:

*shorter Senate terms and an end to its malapportionment in favour of sparsely-populated, non-urban, white-dominated states;

*separate elections for the heads of executive departments, as is the case to varying extents in all fifty states (would the 2008 electorate have elected a Wall Street insider like Timothy Geithner as Treasury Secretary?);

*elections for the federal judiciary (historically, merit selection of judges has been implemented at state level at the behest of corporate interests outraged at the election of pro-labour and minority judges);

*elections for federal regulatory bodies (authorities such as the FTC, FCC, SEC, NLRB, and Federal Reserve are rendered toothless and subject to institutional capture due to the behind-closed-doors appointment process; twelve states elect public utility regulators, and the adoption of the practice at federal level would force the likes of Ben Bernanke to justify their policies to the electorate).

With this package of institutional reforms, the government of the United States could once again be one of the people, by the people, and for the people.