Testing Competitive Theories

From "The Trouble With Elections: Everything We Thought We Knew About Democracy is Wrong," Chapter 9.5

A core concept of any democracy is the notion that the government should reflect, or be responsive to the preferences or interests of the whole population, or at least the majority of the population. Scholars have proposed at least three basic theories for how our competitive system works. The most optimistic version can be termed the majoritarian electoral democracy theory, and sees the political class constantly monitoring the preferences of voters, with political parties leaning towards the political median in order to win elections. Under this system, voters, or at least the voters in the middle of the spectrum (the so-called “median voter”), should have powerful influence if not absolute control over policies adopted by government. Another common theory, called pluralism or polyarchy, holds that interest groups, either mass-based (e.g. unions, fundamentalist Christian organizations, the NRA and AARP) or professional and business-oriented interest groups (e.g. the Chamber of Commerce, American Medical Association,  National Home-Builders Association and banking and investment companies), shape government decisions. A third theory argues that electoral competition in most democracies is little more than a charade, with (typically) wealthy elites pulling the strings of the dominant political parties on key issues, though not all issues. This elite domination theory is typified by such works as sociologist C. Wright Mills’ influential 1956 book, The Power Elite. Left-wing political observers, such as Noam Chomsky, have argued that an individual’s ability to gain access to the levers of power – getting into the political class – is effectively determined by whether an individual has shown an ability and willingness to serve the interests of those with great wealth and power. 

Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University undertook a ground-breaking quantitative analysis comparing the validity of these basic theories of how our “democracy” actually works. Their paper “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” presented a multivariate analysis comparing these common theories using a unique data set of 1,779 policy issues. The researchers compiled the results of numerous public opinion polls between 1981 and 2002 in which policy preferences and respondent income data were included. They also coded the expressed policy preferences of a large number of organized interest groups — both mass-based and professional and business interests. Next they examined whether the policy preferences of people in different income groups and of interest groups ended up being adopted by the government. Using the top ten percent of income earners (the affluent) as an available proxy for the likely preferences of the top one percent or genuinely wealthy elite, and the fifty percent income decile as a proxy for the median voter, they made some important discoveries. On issues where the preferences of the wealthy and the middle group diverged in terms of preferences, there was a strong correlation between the policy preferences of the wealthiest ten percent and government action. But, this was not the case for average Americans. They found no evidence for the majoritarian or “median voter” theory. Rather, they discovered that 

“the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy….Nor do organized interest groups substitute for direct citizen influence, by embodying citizens’ will and ensuring that their wishes prevail in the fashion postulated by theories of Majoritarian Pluralism. … So existing interest groups do not serve effectively as transmission belts for the wishes of the populace as a whole… When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose.”

The authors do offer several caveats, however. Firstly, they observe that 

“this does not mean that ordinary citizens always lose out; they fairly often get policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by economically elite citizens who wield actual influence.” 

They acknowledge that it is conceivable (though they doubt it) that high income citizens have a better grasp of the common good (as many eighteenth century aristocrats quoted earlier in this book believed), while average citizens simply are mistaken about their own self interests. They also note that their study could not examine the framing of the agenda —  in other words, the policy questions deemed worthy of asking by the various polling firms — and whether this agenda was itself set by economic elites or interest groups. The vast array of “under the radar” policy issues considered (or ignored) by Congress, which are never subject to opinion surveys (and about which hardly any ordinary people are aware), suggests that their study almost certainly understates the dominance of elites and interest groups. And finally, they note that the public preferences revealed by the surveys were not the result of meaningful deliberation, but rather off-the-cuff opinions. Their research could not examine to what extent these preferences were shaped by persuasion efforts of elites and interest groups, and whether those opinions would hold fast following serious deliberation. On many of the issues that were surveyed, it would be ridiculous to think that most respondents had sufficient background knowledge to have any considered opinion at all. Democracy should not mean blind governmental responsiveness to off-the-cuff opinions.

This “scientific confirmation” of the assertion that ordinary citizens do not “rule,” and do not even have a significant influence, let alone direct their rulers on policy matters, has been hyped by those on the left as proof that America is an oligarchy rather than democracy. But this oversimplifies the implications of the paper. It has also been seriously critiqued by some other academics, both in terms of methodology and interpretation. Their study also doesn’t empirically demonstrate if domination by economic elites and business-oriented interest groups is common to all electoral governments, or just the American variant. After all, there are alternative electoral models (incorporating proportional representation, campaign finance regulation, media access, etc.) that are intended to avoid this elite domination of government and allow the people to rule. 

To examine this question, two Swedish researchers undertook a massive study combining survey data on a wide range of issues from over two million respondents in forty three countries.  They discovered several interesting things. Firstly, they found that the more affluent favor more economically conservative, but culturally liberal policies than the less wealthy, and that in both of these domains, elected governments appear more representative of the wealthy. However, elected governments repeatedly 

“implemented policies beyond even what the most affluent quintile in our data wants. Thus, the discrepancy in responsiveness cannot be explained by unequal responsiveness to different groups of voters. Instead, it is possible that a systematic bias against certain types of policies is driven not from below, by citizens, but by the political establishment itself, a proposition that has been theorized but not systematically tested.”

The researchers propose that their study indicates that the notion of a differential in government responsiveness to different income groups masks a more significant political class (politician) domination.

“This leads us to question whether the story really is about unequal responsiveness, as most existing literature would have it, or about general lack of responsiveness on behalf of the political system. The idea of unequal responsiveness implies that there is [a] causal effect of the attitude of the affluent [on] policy. But our results show that an alternative explanation is that some other factors cause policy to be more economically conservative and culturally liberal. While that in practice means that the affluent are better represented, it could be coincidental, if the true causal mechanism is related to factors internal to the political system. … The picture that emerges is one where parties have considerable leeway to pursue policies preferred by leadership and core activists, and sometimes do, even in the face of a hostile public opinion.”

It should be noted, however, that a constraint on their analysis arises from the lack of fine grain detail in the available income data. They could only compare the policy preferences of the top fifth (quintile) of income earners with the rest of the population. But it is possible that this nominally “high income” group is not that dissimilar from the bulk of the population, while the top 0.1% of income earners (for example) could have distinctly different policy preferences, but be essentially invisible in the data because of their rarity. If politicians were being uniquely responsive to the super-rich, it wouldn't be detectable in any study based on survey data.

The other limitation of all such studies is the relevance of off-the-cuff public opinion in terms of judging meaningful responsiveness and representation. Also, as noted above, there are a relatively limited number of “issues'' that polling firms have chosen to include in their voter surveys. This generally, though not exclusively, reflects the agenda of “news-worthy” topics that political leaders have promoted. Competitive elections inevitably generate a simplified pseudo-politics for mass consumption. Keen observers are aware that much of what passes for “politics” is performance for the media. The political scientist Murray Edelman formulated the concept of symbolic politics in the 1980’s, which underpins most political communication. There are two political “realities;” there is the actual effect political actions have in the real world, and the theatrical packaging or symbolic impact in the electoral arena. In his short but deeply insightful book Constructing the Political Spectacle, Edelman argues that political players are compelled to produce a simplified make-believe political world using symbols and rituals to sway voters through the mass media.