
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, Citizens [pdf] - vixen99
http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%20and%20Page/Gilens%20and%20Page%202014-Testing%20Theories%203-7-14.pdf
======
twoodfin
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._

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

~~~
twoodfin
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.

~~~
anigbrowl
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.

~~~
twoodfin
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...

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noobhacker
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).

~~~
twoodfin
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._

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

~~~
twoodfin
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.

~~~
noobhacker
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.

~~~
shudmeyer
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...](http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/2379ny/study_reveals_how_often_americas_politicians_do/cguw8qs))
but i know it won't get any views... would you mind giving me your feedback on
that?

------
tokenadult
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.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html)

[http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-
economics/21569692...](http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-
economics/21569692-james-buchanan-who-died-january-9th-illuminated-political-
decision-making)

[http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm](http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm)

[http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/pdf%20links/Booklet....](http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/pdf%20links/Booklet.pdf)

[http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html)

[https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Public...](https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Public_choice_theory.html)

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](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill)

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

~~~
noobhacker
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.

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dang
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...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10769041/The-
US-is-an-oligarchy-study-concludes.html)

------
rrggrr
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.

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Pinatubo
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.

~~~
Pinatubo
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.

