Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, Citizens [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, Citizens [pdf]

princeton.edu

46 pointsvixen9923 comments

The linked document is missing its figures and tables, which makes it a little hard to get at the nuts and bolts of the analysis. I don't know if a more complete version is publicly available yet.

They appear to conclude that "economic elites" get their policy preferences enacted more often than the median voter (though there's a good deal of inertia that makes change difficult no matter which groups want it). That's not surprising to me in a republican system: Elites are the ones getting elected! This is not necessarily a bug if you think voters are better as judges of character, values and capability than as issue-by-issue decision makers. The authors disagree, though I think they describe the other side of the argument uncharitably:

A possible objection to populistic democracy is that average citizens are inattentive to politics and ignorant about public policy; why should we worry if their poorly informed preferences do not influence policy making? Perhaps economic elites and interest group leaders enjoy greater policy expertise than the average citizen does. Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and perhaps they seek the common good, rather than selfish ends, when deciding which policies to support.

But we tend to doubt it. We believe instead that – collectively – ordinary citizens generally know their own values and interests pretty well, and that their expressed policy preferences are worthy of respect.

No it isn't. They start on page 25, although the I would certainly appreciate a link to the source data.

Ahh... thanks!

Yeah, I'd be most interested in seeing the extremes: Which are the policy changes with 80%+ support from non-"elite" income Americans that top-10%-ers did not approve and were not enacted? And vice-versa: Which very unpopular ideas have become law with only support from the elite? They list some of these in parentheticals, but links to some individual surveys would be more useful.

Agreed. It's not definitive but it's a great jumping-off point. I plan to track down the book mentioned in the paper as having a lot of the source data, I too would have liked more in-depth analysis.

I am unfamiliar with how this stuff is supposed to work in the social sciences, but it's a little disturbing that Gilens seems to be mining this curated "database" of polls for several years of high profile publications instead of releasing it publicly. Maybe it's in an appendix to the book...

Alright, this paper got 3000 upvotes on reddit and I thus failed to make a dent to the hivemind. I will try here once more.

I have two criticisms of this paper: 1) I did not find any details regarding how they construct the population's preference on policy. (I'm glad if someone can educate me.) I highly doubted that they can poll a significant amount and a representative sample of people on nearly 2000 issues spanning the 80s-now. Even if they can, think about the survey fatigue that these people suffer.

2) They do not control for anything besides wealth. What if wealthy people are just smart / motivated -- and motivated people get involved more and have more influence on policy. I'm not advocating any hypothesis of my own here and simply criticizing the scientific validity of the authors.

Finally, as a insider of Political Science, I would recommend that everyone takes any study with a huge grain of salt. (I recognize that that claim is unsupported by this comment, but just an observation).

From page 10:

What makes possible an empirical effort of this sort is the existence of a unique data set, compiled over many years by one of us (Gilens) for a different but related purpose: for estimating the influence upon public policy of “affluent” citizens, poor citizens, and those in the middle of the income distribution.

Gilens and a small army of research assistants gathered data on a large, diverse set of policy cases: 1,779 instances between 1981 and 2002 in which a national survey of the general public asked a favor/oppose question about a proposed policy change. A total of 1,923 cases met four criteria: dichotomous pro/con responses, specificity about policy, relevance to federal government decisions, and categorical rather than conditional phrasing. Of those 1,923 original cases, 1,779 cases also met the criteria of providing income breakdowns for respondents, not involving a Constitutional amendment or a Supreme Court ruling (which might entail a quite different policy making process), and involving a clear, as opposed to partial or ambiguous, actual presence or absence of policy change. These 1,779 cases do not constitute a sample from the universe of all possible policy alternatives (this is hardly conceivable), but we see them as particularly relevant to assessing the public’s influence on policy. The included policies are not restricted to the narrow Washington “policy agenda.” At the same time – since they were seen as worth asking poll questions about – they tend to concern matters of relatively high salience, about which it is plausible that average citizens may have real opinions and may exert some political influence.

This passage talks about what policies are included, not how the respondents are recruited / how their answers are recorded.

These were all presumably publicly available national polls, conducted by a variety of organizations using a variety of methods. Unfortunately, the origins of this data set are with Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America by Martin Gilens (one of the authors of this paper), and thus it's difficult to learn more about them without having the book on hand.

I'd be interested to know if they only used non-partisan polls from national polling organizations (e.g. Gallup), as opposed to polls conducted under the auspices of an interest group.

Thanks for the info. On the one hand I feel (emphasis on feel) like the conclusion is correct. But on the other hand, as a Political Scientist I have to treat this as a scientific endeavour and criticize its method regardless of its conclusion. And as a scientific work, this piece ranks lowly I think. There is very little theory, i.e. okay, even if the rich gets more influence, exactly why is that true? If it's because of campaign contribution law, we can test that thanks to change in campaign law. Plus, the people can always vote their representatives out of Congress -- why don't they? Is it because of a lack of transparency on their representatives' stand? Is it because campaign ads are so effective? Or even because that people don't really care enough?

Anyhow, this paper may (or may not) report an intriguing empirical regularity. But what to make of it is not at all very clear.

> But what to make of it is not at all very clear.

One possibility is that the fairy tale of representative government is wrong, and that, because of both structural problems and money politics, we don't live in a representative system that deserves deference from the people. We're living on the rentiers' plantation.

If that's true, inevitably the field servants will wonder "Why not burn it down?"

[Disclaimer: I read the (original) telegraph.co.uk link, but only started on the mod-altered link to the PDF.]

The notion that "political science" is science is propaganda. (Which is how we'd see "political science" in the former USSR, because we're encouraged to see its ideological filters. Though of course not our own.) To act politically, the necessary principles of world affairs are close to the surface; it's not quantum physics. Anyway, a science of human affairs is currently (and perhaps in principle) intractable, just like a scientific analysis of any vaguely complex animal's actions.

Unsurprising when capitalists dominate a capitalist society. That's the point. (Even if we did swallow the fake distinction between politics and economics.)

consider the time period studied as well. that 20 year period was incredibly business-friendly, so it should be no surprise that policy outcomes matched business values at large. i wrote a longer response here (http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/2379ny/study_revea...) but i know it won't get any views... would you mind giving me your feedback on that?

The dissonance between Washington and Main St is very visible even for the unfocused of the observers. I have problem with your second point, which seems to be coming out of "fox news" playbook. Rich people are likely motivated - I do not know how a person sorting the labels in Walmart at 3 am in the morning (certainly not in my book) is not "motivated" and the fact that most Rich are "sperm lottery" winners (unlike the self-made businessman myth right tries to pedal), but its the other way round the impediments for rich motivated person are few compared to impediments for poor motivated person. The poor motivated person makes a placard and goes to his congressman, where the rich motivated person donates the max the congressman and would get 30 minutes of Congressman's time during fund raising or some other "social" event.

> The dissonance between Washington and Main St

Without disagreeing with your comment, may I gently suggest (to all HNers) that ideologically charged catch-phrases are best avoided here. As we all know, this kind of thread is sensitive to getting derailed—or perhaps one should say railed, onto predictable, predefined tracks that go straight to the shouting matches. Those are exciting, but low-quality agitation. On HN we want light, not heat, and experience shows you can't have both—not on the internet anyway.

Because our brains are all programmed to react reflexively to these phrases—whether positively or negatively doesn't matter—I think we should strive to edit them out of our comments. The signal/noise ratio will be higher for it, and the risk of sparking a flamewar lower.

I agree with you. I understand that the post has to be substantial and devoid of "reflexive phrases".

At the risk of getting down-voted, growing up (not in the US) I used to watch construction workers - a woman with a toddler few feet from construction working from early morning 5a.m. to 9p.m. People living in squalor making clothes and dyes and giving it all while doing it. So for the narrative of "rich people are more motivated than poor" is repugnant and would not let that statement go unchallenged.

I have no light to shine - I live under the sun along with the light, I will take the heat.

As I browsed through the paper, it occurred to me that readers here on Hacker News may want to know more about public choice theory, a theoretical perspective that suggests some reasons why representative democracy will not work as ideally as hoped in any country. (The founders of the United States, writing about two centuries before public choice theory was studied under that name, were actually quite hard-headed about such issues, as you can see by reading The Federalist, the book including essays mostly by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton about why the federal Constitution should be ratified, although imperfect, in the 1780s.) Some links that I like for introductions to public choice theory (something I studied in a law school class on legislation in the 1980s) include these that I've Google up a few times before.

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html

http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21569692...

http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm

http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/pdf%20links/Booklet....

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html

https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Public...

As usual, the Winston Churchill quotation gets it right: "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill

Has public choice theory ever been put to the test empirically?

Ah ha! You just identified the great debate in Political Science. It's very hard to empirically test game theoretical models since a lot of the model components are about the utility of the actors which is very hard to get at empirically. Plus, things like repeated game have multiple equilibria and we don't really know why the equilibrium that is our world gets to happen.

Since the study may be interesting, I changed the url from [1] to the paper itself.

All: This is one of those subjects that is fine for HN if the discussion remains substantive and civil, and otherwise deserves to be flagged. If you comment in this thread, please make sure your comment is substantive and on-topic.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...

Except this: The lawyer's lobby (gives the most) largely advocates for laws that let them monetize human suffering to the benefit of humans suffering at the hands of corporations; The retired lobby (gives 2nd most) largely advocates positions that reduce medical expenses and margins for healthcare firms. On the opposite side is insurance and business lobbies opposing the lawyers, and healthcare lobbies opposing retirees positions. The notion that an oligarchy controls American disconnected from citizens interests, and free from competing interests is hyperbole that makes for cool titles. Intensely competing interests = democracy.

I think it's deliberately misleading to say the study is "from Princeton and Northwestern Universities," when it's a coauthored article by one professor from each place. I think that was done to make the study sound more important, probably because the author of the news article agrees with the premise of the study.

And based on the downvotes, it appears that many people here also agree with the premise of the study!

Seriously, publications are by professors, not universities. It's at best lazy and inaccurate reporting to say otherwise.

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