David Schultz, The Daily Record Newswire
Who governs? How democratic is America? These are staple questions in an introductory American political science class. But these are also questions of interest to political scientists and ordinary citizens. These questions concern who holds influence in America, who our elected officials listen to, and even, perhaps, whether it makes sense for individuals to vote.
One way to answer these questions is simple: Ask into who benefits from American public policy — its winners and losers. If we take this approach, then two recent studies ring loud that it is not the poor and middle class who govern, but that instead America has increasingly become a democracy for the few.
The concept that America is a democracy for the few is not a recent one, even for political scientists. E. E. Schattschneider’s landmark 1960 book “The Semisovereign People: A Realistic View of Democracy in America” contended that the United States was an oligarchy in which only a few million out of approximately 180 million had any meaningful voice in American politics. His criticism was directed at the then-prevailing theory of American politics, which held that the United States was a pluralist democracy featuring competition among thousands if not tens of thousands of groups who took part in a wide distribution of power across the entire US population.
Schattschneider’s argument was that groups vary in size and resources, that many interests are not protected, and that overall the political playing field was not level. Instead, Schattschneider contended, the distribution of political power reflected what he called a “mobilization of bias.” By that, he meant some groups or interests were able to control political conflict in America and secure favored treatment for their interests. The bias that Schattschneider saw — based on his analysis of who joins groups and which groups were successful — was an upper class bias. Grant McConnell’s 1966 “Private Power and American Democracy” and Ted Lowi’s 1969 “The End of Liberalism” made similar arguments about the role of interest groups and political influence in the United States.
A generation later, in 1977, Charles E. Lindblom’s “Politics and Markets” argued that there was a “privileged position” afforded to business interests in American politics. In seeking to reconcile democracy with corporate power, he contended that the power and favored role that the latter received in American society rendered its status incongruent with democracy in the United States. Businesses and corporate interests have the power to disinvest and veto government policies they do not like. Politicians curry favor to create “business-friendly” environments, and tax breaks and other subsidies are offered to companies to induce their relocation even though there is no evidence that these goodies are economically worthwhile to communities.
But one can argue that all these studies are ancient history — that the America of the 1960s and 1970s is so different from today that political power and influence is more equitably distributed now. Perhaps, since the time many of these books were written, the civil rights movement and leaps in education have transformed the political landscape of the country.
The reality is, no. For example, repeated studies such as “The New American Voter” (1996) by political scientists Warren Miller and J. Merrill Shanks or “The American Voter Revisited” (2008) by Michael Lewis-Beck, et al., document that there persists a huge gap in voter turnout in the United States that stratifies turnout by race, class, and occasionally gender.
Andrew Hacker’s 2003 “Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal” reveal a country as racially divided as ever. Kay Lehman Schlozman, et al., in their 2012 “The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy,” also chart the influence of a select few in the United States. And a host of credible studies by the Congressional Budget Office, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), and other entities all attest to the dramatic growth of the gap in income and wealth between the top 20 percent, 5 percent, or 1 percent and the rest of us since the 1970s. We are a far less equal country now than before.
Perhaps this gap is simply the result of fair competition in markets, which has produced winners and losers. Maybe. But there is no question that there is a powerful connection between who has political influence and who seems to be winning economically, or at least reaping the benefit of public policy in America. This now brings us to two current studies confirming the persisting truth of Schattschneider’s thesis that the United States is a democracy for the few.
In “Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America” (2012), political scientist Michael Gilens examined who politicians listened to. He found that when one looked at public opinion polls on a variety of issues, there was often a gap between what majorities favored and what more affluent interests desired. When the two conflicted, the rich won out. But more recently, Gilens and his co-author (the political scientist Benjamin Page) argue in a forthcoming article, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” that the best models for explaining political power and influence in the United States are those that largely confirm the upper class bias articulated by Schattschneider. Consistently upper class interests prevailed over majoritarian preferences.
The public policy winners have been the affluent. Not even the middle class are winning. This is the subject of the second study published in the New York Times on April 23, 2014. There it described how the American middle class was no longer the world’s richest, but that it had now fallen behind that of Canada. America’s middle class is rapidly losing ground in comparison to those in other European countries. Part of America’s strength has always been its large and relatively well-off middle class, but over a generation or two, and especially since the economic crash of 2008, America’s economic center has been eroding. Median family incomes are down, debt is up, unemployment is up, and the middle class is being squeezed.
There are many reasons why the Canadian middle class is doing better, but government policy may be one critical factor. Take health care: In 1970 the US and Canada each spent about 7 percent of GDP on health care. In 1971, Canada instituted a single-payer universal coverage program. By 1990, Canada spent 9 percent of the GDP on health care, the US 11.9 percent, with 38.9 million uninsured. Canada’s single-payer system appeared to be containing costs, saving the middle class and all of its citizens’ money.
Meanwhile, America’s growth in the share of GDP spent on health care would continue to grow — reaching 18 percent by 2008. Second, unlike the United States, which deregulated the banking system in the late 1990s, Canada continued to regulate. In 2008, when the US and world banking system crashed, Canada remained largely immune, thereby insulating the middle class from the crash in home values that Americans felt.
Why is there less of an upper class bias in the Canadian political system? Again, no single answer, but in general that country’s political system is less susceptible to the pressures of money in politics than the United States.
Canada more tightly regulates the use of money for political purposes. It has done a better job building firewalls to separate economic affluence from political influence. Unlike the United States, which seems to accept that money is good and should be able to buy just about anything, Canada and most of America’s OECD peers reject such a belief and have constructed political systems that are more responsive to the people and not to the rich.
