“Who governs? Who really rules?”
Political scientists Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern set out to find answers to those important questions. Do we still have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people,” as Abraham Lincoln famously put it in the Gettysburg Address?
To find out, Gilens and Page identified 1,779 policy disputes from 1981 to 2002 in which polling data were available and in which the responses were broken down by income. Using that data, they identified the positions held by the majority of Americans, and they also identified the policy preferences held by Americans at the 10th percentile of income, at the 50th percentile of income and at the 90th percentile of income. That data gave them a pretty good grasp of what the poor, the middle class and what they call the “economic elites” wanted out of politics.
Time and again, the opinion of the majority didn’t seem to matter in how an issue was decided. The opinion of the middle class also didn’t matter. On issue after issue, the opinion that mattered was that of the most affluent Americans.
Or as Gilens and Page put it:
“When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy…. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose.”
In a sense, that finding validates the frustration and even impotence that has fueled the rebellion by the Tea Party and the Republican base against the establishment. They’re right; they ARE being ignored. They’re right; their voices are not being heard. They’re right; the elites who actually run the place have tuned them out. To quote Gilens and Page again, “average citizens’ preferences continue to have essentially zero estimated impact upon policy change.”
However, there is one critical difference between the Tea Party world view and the findings of Page and Gilens. The GOP base believes that government is not run by and for economic elites, but by and for poor people who have become reliant on government for subsistence.
That was the core of Mitt Romney’s anguished complaint during the 2012 campaign that he could not reach at least 47 percent of voters, because that 47 percent had now become dependent on government. It also explains why that quote from Alexis de Tocqueville — “The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public’s money” — has become so popular in some quarters. They believe that the Tocquevillian day has arrived, and that the poor have somehow seized the reins of government and are running it to their advantage.
So who’s right?
Well, if we live in a time in which “the producers” have little power and are victims hounded to within an inch of their lives and fortunes, how is it that corporate after-tax profits are at an all-time historic high, wealth and income are concentrating at the top and already sky-high CEO salaries are rising 10 to 20 times faster than that of their employees?
And it would be an odd society indeed in which the poorest, most dependent of its members control things, while the wealthy are forced to dance to their tune. I’m not aware of such a society at any point in history, and don’t expect to see one anytime soon.
