My advanced apologies, I am going to plunge you in at the deep end of some pretty nerdy reading on American politics now. It's super important and amazingly interesting reading, but it's a bit technical. No pain no gain! I need to cover this research because I am going to launch a new tech platform soon and I need to prepare you for the subject matter the platform is going to deal with. More on that tech platform soon! Today I am going to cover a paper released in 2014 by some professors at Princeton University which proved, through an extensive survey, that American politics is run by elite players. You might say you suspected that right? Well this study makes headway towards PROVING it by means of a study done on almost two thousand changes made to America's legal system by politicians in congress. The study looked at whether ordinary people wanted those changes. Then it looked at whether rich people and companies wanted them. In doing so they were able to figure out who is capable of getting what they want! It is groundbreaking in its scope. It's not light reading but don't worry because I read it for you and summarized the important stuff below.
Brace yourselves.. here we go!
The net finding of this survey is that the average person in the United States has a negligible effect on policy making. To quote the authors: “In the United States the majority does not rule.”
These Princeton scholars looked at individual people's preferences regarding almost two thousand policy issues and compared them with the outcome of each proposed policy change. The individuals were put into two groups based on their income. The first group contained the top 10% of earners. The second group contained everybody else whose results they referred to as those of the average citizen. They also looked at the preferences of interest groups and compared those to policy outcomes. They separated the interest groups into two sub groups, business-oriented and mass-oriented groups. This study did something that has never been done before which is to separate out the preferences that one group (such as the average citizen group) had that other groups did not have. By doing this you don't get misled by the fact that an average citizen is getting what they want, but that's only because they want the same thing that elites want. In other words, by only looking at the policy preferences where average citizens and elites disagree, you can see how capable average citizens are of getting their own way.
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Here are the most salient pieces of the report:
The report covers some history to get us started on the subject. In support of elite domination theory (which is the idea that elites control the government) “Charles Beard.. maintained that a chief aim of the framers of the U.S. Constitution was to protect private property, favoring the economic interests of wealthy merchants and plantation owners rather than the then-majority small farmers, laborers and craft workers.”
Majoritarian pluralist theory is a fancy way of naming the theory that decisions made by our government are driven by the wants of the average citizen.
“A major challenge to majoritarian pluralist theories.. [is that] individuals.. have no incentive to.. join an organized group. This is called the collective action problem. Aware of this problem, officials may feel free to... act against the interests of the average citizen.“
Bear in mind “policies with strong support.. among [interest groups and affluent Americans] only get adopted 56% of the time [this is called "status quo" bias.]
One may argue that ordinary citizens get their way a lot because the report finds that elite's preferences tend to coincide with the preferences of the average American. In response to this the report argues that “the issues about which economic-elites and ordinary citizens disagree reflect important matters, including many aspects of trade restrictions, tax policy, corporate regulation, abortion and school prayer" and thus cannot be ignored.
Let's move on to organized interest groups. The authors warn that the report includes policies thought to be important enough for a national opinion survey. Interest-group clout may be underestimated in the likely event that groups have more success on “narrow issues like special tax breaks or subsidies aimed at just one or two business firms [than they do on more broadly important issues which are more likely to be included in this survey.]”
“An important feature of interest group influence is that it is very often deployed against policy changes” reinforcing "status quo" bias.
As to the relative influence of business-oriented groups vs mass-oriented groups, “the greater total influence of business groups in [the] analysis results chiefly from the fact that more of them are generally engaged on each issue (roughly twice as many, on average,) it is not that a single business group has more clout on average than a single mass-based group.“
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I once read a politics course study textbook called "The Irony of Democracy." The book made the case that the elite make better decisions for the masses than the masses would make for themselves. This report points out that the best advocates for the interests of the masses are most likely to be the masses themselves. There is scant evidence supporting the idea that elites will vote against their own self-interests for the benefit of the masses.
So that's the summary. It's pretty hairy news. How do we fix this issue? I will soon be releasing an exciting tech platform which has the potential to address it!
I am Cecilia Mackie, MPhys and I worked on Wall Street for 10 years where I rose to an executive level. The owners of a firm I worked at are now in jail. Because of this experience I have avidly researched corruption based issues over the last few years. Outside of this blog, I am building a tech platform which will allow people to participate in a community for political change. The platform will have a mechanism to allow our community to enact change within the world of American politics. Stay tuned for this exciting development!
Please go to www.mackiemusic.com to access my social media pages and learn more about my polymathematical world of wonder!
