OK, the findings in one study do not necessarily make anything official. But this is a joint study by political science professors from Princeton University and Northwestern University with numerous publications to their credit. Moreover, it more or less corroborates what many of us have suspected for years—our government no longer represents “we the people.” This is not just a problem with elected officials, but extends to broader social structures that operate to keep the voice and concerns of regular working people unheard on policy agendas. More people are becoming aware of this, and frustration on both the left and the right has resulted in the anti-establishment movements known as the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.
Political scientists describe the process of how policy is formulated, developed, and eventually adopted through three broad basic models. The first model is majoritarian pluralism. This is the “majority rules” model that most of us learn in school. Indeed, the founding fathers were rightly concerned about the possibility of mob rule, political chaos and “tyranny of the majority,” and so they designed a system of government based on separation of power, checks and balances. This created a conservative bias, which means that all else being equal, it is harder to institute change than to maintain the status quo. The second model, interest-group pluralism, proposes that policy influence is brought about by competition between organized interest groups. Because these groups have organization and resources, they are better able to develop expertise on a particular issue as well as create an infrastructure where their voices are heard by policymakers. Both the majoritarian pluralism and the interest-group pluralism model predict that political candidates will tailor their policy platforms to accommodate as many of the competing viewpoints as they are able, thus policy results tend to represent some reasonable manifestation of the preferences of the “average” citizen.
Thomas Dye is a modern advocate of what has come to be known as elite theory. Dye is the author of The Irony of Democracy, Top-Down Policymaking, Politics in America, and Who’s Running America among other publications on the same issue. In a nutshell, elite theory proposes that: (1) society is divided into the few who have power and the many who do not, (2) the few who govern are not typical of the masses who are governed, (3) elites share consensus on the basic values of the social system and the preservation thereof, (4) public policy is set by, and reflects the demands of, prevailing elites and is imposed downward on the masses and (5) the masses are relatively apathetic and exert little direct influence on elites and their policies. A corollary of elite theory which combines it with interest group pluralism is biased pluralism. Biased pluralism predicts that it is elite groups—corporations, professional associations, think tanks, chambers of commerce—rather than elite individuals who have the greatest influence on policy.
In the Princeton study, the professors developed an updated analytical model to test the predictive validity of these four political models. First, they identified 1,779 distinct “policy cases” that represented an identifiable policy change and a clearly defined dichotomous “pro/con” response. They also collected surveys of policy preferences based on respondents’ income level (at the tenth, fiftieth, and ninetieth percentiles). Prior studies had suggested that each of the aforementioned models had some degree of predictive validity. In this study, the professors used more complex analytics to better parse out some of the confounding variables in the prior studies. For example, there are cases in which the preferences of average citizens and the preferences of elites are highly correlated. In such cases, ordinary citizens might appear to “win” on a policy issue, when they have simply been coincidental beneficiaries of elite lobbying. Alternatively, the general public tends to be more divided on particular “hot button” issues such as abortion and gun control, while elites tend to be more united. Consequently, in this study, the authors paid particular attention to policy issues on which elites and ordinary citizens disagreed. The findings are summarized below:
1. When the preferences of elites (wealthy individuals) and net interest-group alignments is held constant, the preferences of the general public have virtually no effect on policy. The authors conclude that “empirical support for Majoritarian Pluralism looks very shaky, indeed.” What this means is that the democratic principles upon which our country was founded no longer apply.
2. Organized interest groups as a whole have a “very substantial and independent impact” on policy. However, when the authors computed separate net-interest-group alignment for business-oriented and mass-based groups, the influence coefficients for the business groups was nearly twice as large as that for the mass groups. This is due to both the numerical advantage of business interest groups as well as the fact that (unlike the general public) they are rarely on opposite sides of an issue, particularly economic issues. In essence, the model generally supports interest group pluralism, with the caveat that in the U.S., interest groups are “heavily tilted toward corporations, businesses, and professional associations.” Moreover, the alignments of these groups are negatively correlated with the preferences of average citizens.
3. The elite theory model also performed well, and the authors suggest that it probably understates the political influence of elites. For one thing, their data captured preferences in the top 10 percent, but they could not state with specificity how much of this was due to the top 1%, the top one-tenth of 1%, or the more numerous individuals around the 90th percentile. Also, economic elites tend to occupy positions of influence (high social standing and high-level positions in institutions), from which they can work to shape and shift the preferences of others lower in the hierarchy.
4. Finally, the authors examined the effects of policy preferences on the status quo, with the assumption that it would be more difficult when the proposed policy requires the government to act or change something (the status quo bias). In these cases, even when an overwhelming majority (80%) of the public favors change, it is only successful about 43% of the time. These results suggest a cumulative effect of policy that favors elites, as elite-favored policy tends to become more of the status quo with each passing year. This phenomenon could also explain the compounding effects of income and wealth inequality, which has also been documented.
The authors conclude by stating, “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 miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” To which I respond, “Why are we not surprised?”
So what does all this mean for most of the rest of us? There is some suggestion that if “we the people” could form a sufficient number of groups (with a sufficient number of members and resources) we might have a better chance. In essence, organization and mobilization is the key to being heard and impacting policy. But this takes effort, energy and organization, which many of us may not have because we are too busy simply surviving. Another practical problem is how to coordinate the efforts of already existing social change groups who are working on a multiplicity of unrelated or only tangentially related issues. In the non-profit world, the emphasis is on capacity-building and resilience because—just like working people—many non-profits have to spend time, effort and resources just to manage their funding sources and cash flow, which makes less of this available to the servicing of their mission. Moreover, non-profits who are dependent on mainstream foundation money may find themselves cut off if they advocate policy positions that are not acceptable to their wealthy funders.
Thus there appears to be a sort of catch-22: it takes organization to affect policy and it requires resources (time, energy, money) to get organized. So if organization presents too many logistical problems for ordinary citizens to effect significant change in policy, what are the alternatives? Chris Hedges in his 2015 The Wages of Rebellion depicts a downward spiral of more vigorous public protests followed by increasingly forceful counter-resistance efforts and corresponding growth of the police and surveillance state, which will eventually lead to totalitarianism. Hedges argues that when the people have no voice or power in such an oppressive state, there is tantamount to a moral imperative for revolution. The American Declaration of Independence itself proclaims both the right and the duty of the People to alter or abolish any government (including the very one being created) when it becomes destructive of the life, liberty and happiness of its citizens.
So, if “we the people” are not being heard, we might just have to make a lot more noise.
