Grappling with American Oligarchy

Paul Starr over at The New Republic has an excellent review of The Unheavenly Chorus, Oligarchy and The MoveOn Effect. Here's what he has to say of the first of those three books:

Turning to its central theme of unequal voice in America today, The Unheavenly Chorus sets out a detailed account of differences in individual political participation. Voting is relatively egalitarian, at least compared with political contributions. Americans in the top fifth in socioeconomic status (a combined measure of income and education) are “roughly twice as likely to go to the polls as those in the bottom quintile” but about eight times more likely to make a political donation. The more affluent also vote with greater regularity from one election to the next: when turnout is low, it tends to drop the most among the disadvantaged. As a result, inequalities in voting participation are related to the overall level of turnout.

Some research suggests that nonvoters do not differ in their views from voters, but The Unheavenly Chorus assembles broader evidence on participation showing that the politically inactive differ systematically from the active public. They are more likely to be in economic need and to favor universal health insurance and other social benefits. Studies of the responsiveness of government to different socioeconomic groups confirm that enacted policies reflect the views of the more affluent. In research cited by Schlozman and her co-authors, Martin Gilens of Princeton University analyzed nearly two thousand questions in public-opinion surveys about proposed national policies from 1981 to 2002. On issues where opinion varied by income, he found that the policies finally adopted were strongly related to the preferences of upper-income people, and not at all to what the poor or even middle-income Americans wanted.

The data on organized interests tell a similar story about unequal power, though with many complicating details. The authors of The Unheavenly Chorus draw on a variety of sources, but mainly they rely on an analysis that they conducted of twelve thousand organizations listed in the Washington Representatives directory. Contrary to a widespread misunderstanding, only a small proportion of groups represented in Washington (12 percent) are associations made up of individuals. The majority are corporations, governmental bodies, and associations of institutions. By sheer numbers, “representation of business is dominant.” In contrast, most workers who are neither professionals nor managers have no group in Washington representing their occupational interests, unless they are unionized—and only 7 percent of private-sector workers are now unionized. In no form of organized advocacy do organizations representing the poor register “more than a trace.” The socioeconomic tilt of the pressure-group system is hardly a mystery, especially when it comes to costly services such as lobbying. As Schlozman and her co-authors write, “Because pressure politics relies so heavily on the services of paid professionals, it is a domain that facilitates the conversion of market resources into political advocacy.”

But surely, you might think, many organizations help to rectify that situation by tapping into the less active portions of the public. Alas, The Unheavenly Chorus finds that the efforts of political groups to recruit new members and donors reinforce the socioeconomic bias in political voice. Groups searching for support act as “rational prospectors”—they hunt where the ducks are—seeking out the more affluent and educated because those are the most likely to respond. Solicited political activity turns out to be even more unequally distributed than actions that individuals say they take spontaneously on their own.

The MoveOn Effect seems to suggest that a solution to this problem is a new age of organization. Although reports of the Internet's transformation of politics are wildly exaggerated, it is nonetheless important to consider the Internet as one of many tools of fostering a new age of populist organization. Without a doubt, increased representation holds the potential to stem the growth of the new American oligarchy, and perhaps even reverse it's tide.

The central thesis of Winner-Take-All Politics is that government is an area for organized combat between competing interest groups. Any basic theory of public choice would show that once one specific group becomes disproportionately represented, it only follows that government has the incentives to award them disproportionately. And this is exactly what happened in the last thirty. The only thing guaranteeing the current political framework is the relative strength of competing organized groups.

Look of the number of representative groups in Washington that only act on behalf of organizations (something like 88 percent). When the odds are skewed that heavily, it's no wonder that Middle Class Americans regularly find themselves on the losing end of Washington policy. What if the makeup was different? What if the majority of the groups represented the interests of coalitions of average Americans? Labor fulfilled this role once. And while it might be nice to have a revived labor movement in the US, it doesn't mean that labor is the only possible kind of representative group.

In Unequal Democracy, Bartels points out that the farmers insurance groups of the late 19th century were an important lobbying group on behalf of farmers. The insurers wanted the farmers to do well, since it kept them from having to pay out insurance, which ended up benefiting both sides. Why can't other consumer lobbying firms, representing the interests of people instead of legal entities, be set up? The only thing holding anyone back is willpower.