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Descriptive Representation, Money, and Political Inequality in the United States

2015; Wiley; Volume: 21; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/spsr.12164

1662-6370

Martin Gilens,

Political and Economic history of UK and US

In a democracy, policy decisions are expected to reflect, at least in broad measure, the interests and preferences of the citizens. But recent research shows that government policy in the United States reflects affluent citizens' preferences much more than those of the middle-class or the poor. To what extent does this representational inequality result from the affluent status of policymakers themselves? Over half the members of the U.S. Congress are millionaires (Lipton 2014), and all members of Congress, by dint of their congressional salaries alone, are solidly in the top decile of the American income distribution. It is hard to imagine that representatives' behavior in congress is not shaped, to some degree at least, by the financial interests and the worldviews that are associated with their high economic status. Yet members of congress get elected and remain in office because the policies they peruse are congenial to the constituents, campaign donors, interest groups, and party leaders that support them. Regardless of how economically advantaged or disadvantaged a candidate may be, he or she is constrained by the need to raise money from campaign donors, build a coalition of interest group support, gain the backing of party leaders, and prevail at the ballot box. Even if working class candidates, on average, prefer policies that are more beneficial to less well-off citizens than candidates from more privileged backgrounds, their ability to advance those policies may be limited by the constraints involved in getting elected and staying in office. In this essay I argue that the primary reason that policymakers in the U.S. cater to the preferences and interests of the well to-do is the outsize role of money in American politics. Moving government policy in a direction more reflective of the needs and desires of less advantaged citizens cannot be achieved simply by electing more representatives from the working class. It will require a change in the nature of our electoral system so that representatives—of any background—who prioritize the needs of the less advantaged can get elected and remain in office. A long history of theoretical and empirical research is based on the notion that parties and candidates respond to the preferences of the median voter (Hotelling 1929, Downs 1957, Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002, Page and Shapiro 1983). But growing evidence suggests that average citizens, in fact, have little influence over policymakers. When the preferences of the well to-do are taken into account, what appeared to be responsiveness to middle-income Americans declines substantially or disappears entirely. Larry Bartels, for example, shows that U.S. Senators are consistently more responsive to the political views of their high-income constituents than those with average or below average incomes (Bartels 2008) while Elizabeth Rigby and Gerald Wright find that political parties' platforms in the American states tend to reflect the preferences of their states' affluent, not average, citizens (Rigby and Wright 2013). My own work shows that government policy outcomes—arguably the aspect of the political process we care about most—reflect the preferences of well-off Americans but not those of the middle-class or the poor (Gilens 2012, see also Gilens and Page 2011, 2014). To estimate the association between public preferences and government policy I collected data on 2,245 proposed policy changes between 1964 and 2006. I coded the percentage of survey respondents at different income levels saying they favored or opposed each of these proposed changes and whether or not the change was subsequently adopted (within four years of the date of the survey).1 As one would expect, the more support a given policy has among the public, the more likely it is that that policy will be adopted, and this pattern holds true for respondents at all income levels. Figure 1 shows this relationship separately for respondents at the 10th, 50th, and 90th income percentiles. The probability of a policy being adopted is somewhat more strongly related to the preferences of the affluent than those of the middle class or the poor (the solid line, representing respondents at the 90th income percentile, is somewhat steeper than the lines for the 50th and 10th income percentiles). But the differences among income groups are modest, and at every level of income, favored policies are substantially more likely to be adopted than unfavored policies. The Preference/Policy Link for Respondents at the 10th, 50th, and 90th Income Percentiles Note: Based on 2,245 survey questions concerning proposed policy changes asked between 1964 and 2006. To better gauge the true influence over policymaking of Americans at different income levels, we need to take into account the fact that more and less well-off Americans agree on many policy questions. If affluent Americans are better able to influence policy outcomes than the less well-off, the association of policy outcomes with the preferences of the poor or the middle class shown in figure 1 may simply reflect those proposed changes on which Americans at all income levels agree. Figure 2 shows the same relationships shown in Figure 1, but restricted to proposed policy changes for which low- and high-income Americans' preferences, or middle- and high-income Americans' preferences, diverge by at least 10 percentage points. Here we see a very different picture: the preference/policy link for the affluent remains strong, but when the preferences of less well-off Americans diverge from those at the top of the income distribution, the preferences of the less well-off appear to have virtually no relationship with policy outcomes. Elsewhere, I show that this same pattern of representational inequality exists not only for my full set of proposed policy changes as a whole, but also within each of the specific policy domains I examine: economic policy, foreign policy, social welfare, and moral/religious issues (Gilens 2012). The Preference/Policy Link when Preferences at the 10th or 50th Income Percentiles Diverge From the 90th Income Percentile Note: Based on the 932 and 414 survey questions on which the preferences of people at the 10th and 90th and the 50th and 90th income percentiles diverged by at least 10 percentage points. What explains the lack of responsiveness to the preferences of less well-off Americans? One possibility might be that affluent citizens are more likely to vote, to work on political campaigns, or to engage politically in other ways. But when Bartels included measures of constituents' political participation in his analyses of Senators' voting behavior, he found they accounted for little of the discrepancy between politicians' responsiveness to more and less well-off citizens (Bartels 2008). Moreover, while poor Americans do participate less across numerous measures of political involvement (Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995) the participatory differences between the middle-class and the affluent are quite modest, while the differences in their political influence are great (Gilens 2012). A second possibility is that the responsiveness of federal policy to the preferences of the affluent, and the lack of responsiveness to the less well-off might result from the wide gap between the economic status of American representatives and the people they represent. If elected officials share the class backgrounds and economic interests of the affluent, they might be expected to favor policies that reflect those worldviews and advance those interests. Nicholas Carnes (elsewhere in this volume) examines the outside incomes, net worth, and occupational backgrounds of members of state legislatures and the U.S. Congress (see also Carnes 2012, 2013). Carnes finds no association between members' voting records and their outside income or wealth. In contrast, he shows that representatives' professional histories before they entered Congress are strongly related to their voting records on economic issues. Representatives from the most "conservative professions" (like business owners or skilled professionals) and the most "liberal professions" (like manual laborers or service industry workers), differ by 25 to 50 percent of the range of the economic voting scales Carnes uses. As Carnes notes, some of this difference may result from the kinds of states or districts that the representatives were elected from rather than any independent influence of their occupational backgrounds; if business owners tend to get elected to Congress from conservative districts and service workers from liberal districts, then the association between their voting records and the their previous occupations may be spurious. To test for this possibility, Carnes adds a wide range of control variables to his analyses, including district characteristics like median income, percent union, partisan identification, and political ideology. These controls reduce the apparent association of professional background and congressional voting, but they do not eliminate it. Representatives with the most and least conservative former occupations differ by about 14 to 20 percent of the economic voting scales once these other factors are taken into account. This association between previous occupation and congressional voting suggests that at least some of the representational inequality found in recent research might result from the class composition of Congress. As Carnes shows, representatives with different occupational backgrounds who are elected from similar districts vote differently. A Congress composed of more members from modest backgrounds might therefore be expected to adopt policies at least somewhat more consistent with the economic interests of poor and middle-class Americans. The hope that greater descriptive representation will lead to greater substantive representation rests on the notion that representatives with a particular characteristic (such as occupational background) will, at least on average, share the preferences of constituents with that same characteristic. With regard to social class and the U.S. Congress, Carnes shows that this confluence of preferences does exist, at least to some degree on economic issues. But Carnes' analyses also show that this confluence does not carry over to social issues, where representatives from working class backgrounds tend, if anything, to vote more in line with the (typically more liberal) preferences of higher-income Americans (Carnes 2013: 41). In contrast, analyses of representational biases find that congressional voting and policy outcomes tend to reflect the preferences of affluent Americans on both economic and non-economic issues (Bartels 2008, Gilens 2012). While some part of the former may be attributable to the class backgrounds of members of congress, Carnes' analyses suggest that there must be other factors at work—factors that can account for biased representation on both non-economic and economic policies as well. This brings us to a third explanation for the lack of responsiveness of government policymakers to the preferences of the less well-off—money. Winning a seat in the House of Representatives takes about $1 million, while successful Senate candidates spend about $10 million on average.2 Despite the hope that fundraising over the internet would "democratize" campaign finance, the money that funds federal elections is coming from fewer and fewer people, each giving larger and larger amounts. Thirty years ago, about 10% of the money spent in federal elections came from donors who comprised 1/10,000th of U.S. adults (about 16 thousand people); by 2012 the proportion of campaign money contributed by that same tiny fraction of the population had grown to over 40% (Bonica et al. 2013). And while the Obama presidential campaigns were often portrayed as relying on small donations solicited through social media by a savvy grass-roots oriented campaign operation, this small-donor money was eclipsed by contributions from large donors. In 2012, for example, just 33 individuals giving to Super PACs contributed more money to federal races than the Obama and Romney campaigns received from all of their 3.7 million small donors combined (Bowie and Lioz 2013). Outspending your political opponents is no guarantee of electoral victory (as many a losing candidate can attest). But that doesn't mean that money is irrelevant to elections or to the policies the government adopts. Running a viable campaign for federal office requires hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. Only candidates who are themselves rich, or who have the backing of afflunet donors, are likely to prevail. Of course, some affluent donors do favor policies in line with the preferences and interests of the less well-off, and some economically liberal candidates with millions of dollars in donations do win office.3 But their numbers are limited as is their ability to move economic policy in a liberal direction. The overwhelming skew of campaign money from the most affluent Americans all but guarantees that the preferences of the well-to-do will continue to have an outsize influence over federal policy. In addition, we must recognize that Americans of any occupational background—manual worker, lawyer, business owner, etc.—hold a diversity of political views. On average, people with working class backgrounds hold more liberal positions on economic policy. But there are many economically conservative members of the "working class" just as there are many economically liberal lawyers and business owners. Party leaders, interest groups, and campaign donors who favor conservative economic policies may be less likely to find congenial candidates with working class backgrounds, but the working class candidates they do end up supporting are likely to be those with economically conservative views. Electing more working class candidates to congress will only generate greater support for liberal economic policies if the working class candidates support those policies. What is required is not just more representatives with working class backgrounds, but more of the right kind of representatives with working class backgrounds. Yet electing more of the "right kind" of working class candidates to federal office will be difficult because federal candidates need to raise large sums of money in order to mount viable campaigns. What sorts of reforms—if any—might have a realistic chance of significantly reducing the influence of money over electoral outcomes and government policy? No one change is likely to be effective on its own, but closing the loopholes that connect lobbying and campaign contributions, reforming electoral laws to encourage wider voter participation, and ending the "revolving door" through which government policymakers move back and forth between lucrative jobs in industry and the government positions responsible for regulating those industries certainly would help. But the reforms that hold the greatest promise for translating descriptive representation of the less advantaged into substantive representation might be "clean election" laws that provide public funding for candidates and thereby free them from dependence on affluent campaign donors and interest groups. A number of US states and cities have adopted such laws, and studies show that publicly funded elections do increase competition, even the fund raising and vote totals of incumbents and challengers, and reduce the amount of time candidates and office-holders devote to raising money (Miller 2014, Malhotra 2008, Francia and Herrnson 2003). Whether they also shift policy in directions more favorable toward the less advantaged is still unclear (Miller 2011). In sum, a more economically representative U.S. congress might tilt somewhat more toward the economic policies favored by less well-off Americans. But significant change is likely to depend on reforms that reduce the dominance of money in elections. Otherwise, political leaders—regardless of their class backgrounds—will have a hard time moving policy in ways that conflict with the interests of the affluent campaign donors on whom they depend. Martin Gilens is Professor of Politics at Princeton University. His research examines representation, public opinion, and mass media, especially in relation to inequality and public policy. He is the author of Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (2012, Princeton University Press) and Why Americans Hate Welfare: Race, Media and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (1999, University of Chicago Press).