BIG SURPISE - MONEY TALKS!

(h/t Christopher Hayes)


Prof. Martin Gilens studied the influence of income groups on political decisions and found that the affluent have more political influence than either the middle classes or the lower classes.  Larry Bartels has a succinct description of Gilens' research:

...the separate findings of my Princeton colleague Martin Gilens, who has analyzed almost 2,000 survey questions measuring Americans' preferences regarding a wide variety of national policy issues. For each issue, Gilens examined whether a policy change supported or opposed by various segments of the public was subsequently adopted. He found a strong statistical relationship between the views of affluent citizens and the subsequent course of public policy, but a much weaker relationship for less affluent citizens. When he limited his analysis to issues on which rich people and poor people had divergent preferences, he found that the well-off were vastly more likely to see their views reflected in subsequent policy changes. Gilens concluded that "influence over actual policy outcomes appears to be reserved almost exclusively for those at the top of the income distribution."

Kevin Drum provided two graphs that clearly illustrate Gilens' findngs:

We can disagree about the underlying causes for the difference in influence and I am little partial to Matt Yglesias' s socialization hypothesis but the results are clear: We are not much of a democracy on many issues.