Proof The US Is An Oligarchy, Not A Democracy

[verdo]

Another great segment by TYT about money in politics

[Slimprofits]

Re: Proof The US Is An Oligarchy, Not A Democracy

The video is about a statistical study, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" (PDF), authored by Martin Gilens, a professor of Politics at Princeton University and Benjamin I. Page, a professor of Decision Making (?) in the dept. of Political Science at Northwestern University, that will be published in the Fall 2014 in Perspectives on Politics.

Here are two paragraphs from one of many articles and blog entries about the study, these are from the BI:

After sifting through nearly 1,800 U.S. policies enacted in that period and comparing them to the expressed preferences of average Americans (50th percentile of income), affluent Americans (90th percentile), and large special interests groups, researchers concluded that the U.S. is dominated by its economic elite.

The peer-reviewed study, which will be taught at these universities in September, says: "The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."

The study has nothing to do with the personal relationships involved with lobbying, although the authors did attempt to incorporate lobbying in one aspect, but also, the revolving door, election outcomes, campaign financing, the media and probably other factors I'm sure that I'm forgetting, don't know about or can't even imagine.

From the study:

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.

So we're talking about opinion polls -- usually it's a few thousand people being polled, right? And it appears that the results from "a" (quoted wording), i.e. one survey about each policy question was enough for the purposes of the researchers.

and this:

We believe that the preferences of “affluent” Americans at the 90th income percentile can usefully be taken as proxies for the opinions of wealthy or very-high-income Americans, and can be used to test the central predictions of Economic Elite theories. To be sure, people at the 90th income percentile are neither very rich nor very elite; in 2012 dollars, Gilens’ “affluent” respondents received only about $146,000 in annual household income. To the extent that their policy preferences differ from those of average-income citizens, however, we would argue that there are likely to be similar but bigger differences between average-income citizens and the truly wealthy.

Some evidence for this proposition comes from the 2011 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Based on 13 policy preference questions asked on this survey, the preferences of the top 2% of income earners (a group that might be thought “truly wealthy”) are much more highly correlated with the preferences of the top 10% of earners than with the preferences of the average survey respondent (r=.91 vs. .69).35 Thus, the views of our moderately high-income “affluent” respondents appear to capture useful information about the views of the truly wealthy.

So they used a combination of flawed polling data and this (which I cannot easily describe):

In order to measure interest group preferences and actions, we would ideally like to use an index of the sort that Baumgartner and his colleagues developed for their ninety-eight policy issues: an index assessing the total resources brought to bear by all major interest groups that Gilens and Page Testing Theories of American Politics took one side or the other on each of our 1,779 issues. But it is not feasible to construct such an index for all our cases; this would require roughly twenty times as much work as did the major effort made by the Baumgartner research team on their cases. Fortunately, however, Baumgartner et al. found that a simple proxy for their index – the number of reputedly “powerful” interest groups (from among groups appearing over the years in Fortune magazine’s “Power 25” lists) that favored a given policy change, minus the number that opposed it – correlated quite substantially in their cases with the full interest group index (r=0.73).

Gilens, using a modified version of this simple count of the number of “powerful” interest groups favoring (minus those opposing) each proposed policy change, developed a measure of Net Interest Group Alignment. To the set of groups on the “Power 25” lists (which seemed to neglect certain major business interests) he added ten key industries that had reported the highest lobbying expenditures. (For the final list of included industries and interest groups, see Appendix 1.) For each of the 1,779 instances of proposed policy change, Gilens and his assistants drew upon multiple sources to code all engaged interest groups as “strongly favorable,” “somewhat favorable,” “somewhat unfavorable,” or “strongly unfavorable” to the change. He then combined the numbers of groups on each side of a given issue, weighting “somewhat” favorable or somewhat unfavorable positions at half the magnitude of “strongly” favorable or strongly unfavorable positions. In order to allow for the likelihood of diminishing returns as the net number of groups on a given side increases (an increase from 10 to 11 groups likely matters less than a jump from 1 to 2 does), he took the logarithms of the number of pro groups and the number of con groups before subtracting. Thus:

Net Interest Group Alignment = ln(# Strongly Favor + [0.5 * # Somewhat Favor] + 1) - ln(#Strongly Oppose + [0.5 * # Somewhat Oppose] + 1).

and this arbitrary measure of policy change:

Our dependent variable is a measure of whether or not the policy change proposed in each survey question was actually adopted, within four years after the question was asked. (It turns out that most of the action occurred within two years). Of course there was nothing easy about measuring the presence or absence of policy change for each of 1,779 different cases; Gilens and his research assistants spent many hours poring over news accounts, government data, Congressional Quarterly publications, academic papers and the like.

I just don't think this is something that can be measured in a lab, so to speak. Opinion polls can be useful. We know that they can accurately predict the outcome of elections. We know that politicians use polling for their own purposes. But to "measure" what type of political system we have? Politics and policy making is real, social life. I don't buy that it can be measured in this manner, which isn't to say that I don't think big money doesn't dominate politics and policy making or that data (in some forms) cannot be used to inform an opinion.


(I removed the footnote notations from the quoted parts of the study)

[vt]

Re: Proof The US Is An Oligarchy, Not A Democracy

What nations are not dominated by their elites, economic or otherwise?

[Slimprofits]

Re: Proof The US Is An Oligarchy, Not A Democracy

What nations are not dominated by their elites, economic or otherwise?

What about Costa Rica? (a half-assed guess)

[lektrode]

Re: Proof The US Is An Oligarchy, Not A Democracy

What about Costa Rica? (a half-assed guess)

oh give them time, from what i understand, CR has become quite attractive to ex-pat Californians