From Princeton University professor Larry Bartels, Economic Inequality and Political Representation:
Excerpts are available downstairs:
In his 2005 study, Economic Inequality and Political Representation, Professor Bartels used an Senate Election Study sample which he divided into three income groups: a low-income group with family incomes below $20,000 (30.7%), a middle-income group with family incomes ranging from $20,000 to $40,000 (40.2%), and a high-income group with family incomes above $40,000 (29.1%). I would argue that the threshold for the high-income group is set much too low; since economic gains of the past three decades have gone overwhelmingly to the top one tenth of one percent. Still, what Professor Bartels found is a very clear pattern of Republicans favoring the rich, with the poor completely ignored by both Republicans and Democrats.
I examine the differential responsiveness of U.S. senators to the preferences of wealthy, middle-class, and poor constituents. My analysis includes broad summary measures of senators’ voting behavior as well as specific votes on the minimum wage, civil rights, government spending, and abortion. In almost every instance, senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes. Disparities in representation are especially pronounced for Republican senators, who were more than twice as responsive as Democratic senators to the ideological views of affluent constituents. These income-based disparities in representation appear to be unrelated to disparities in turnout and political knowledge and only weakly related to disparities in the extent of constituents’ contact with senators and their staffs.
SNIP
[This] research focuses on representation by U.S. senators in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Using both summary measures of senators’ voting patterns and specific roll call votes on the minimum wage, civil rights, government spending, and abortion, I find that senators in this period were vastly more responsive to the views of affluent constituents than to constituents of modest means. Indeed, my analyses suggest that the views of constituents in the upper third of the income distribution received about 50% more weight than those in the middle third (with even larger disparities on specific salient roll call votes), while the views of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution received no weight at all in the voting decisions of their senators.
SNIP
The results for the vote on raising the minimum wage reflect the political plight of poor constituents in especially poignant form. Those results suggest that senators attached no weight at all to the views of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution – the constituents whose economic interests were obviously most directly at stake – even as they voted to approve a minimum wage increase. The views of middle-income constituents seem to have been only slightly more influential. On this issue, even more than the others considered in Table 2, senators’ voting decisions were largely driven by the ideological predilections of their affluent constituents and by their own partisan inclinations.
SNIP
. . . . differential responsiveness is not limited to ideological issues or to the specific measure of general ideological opinion in the Senate Election Study. Even on abortion – a social issue with little or no specifically economic content – economic inequality produces significant inequality in political representation.
Bartels’ study included votes which occurred during both the Clinton and Bush Jr. administrations, and he finds that political responsiveness to the rich increased measurably under Bush. Bartels notes that this finding suggests
that differential responsiveness may stem not only from the partisan values of senators themselves, but also from the partisan values of presidents whose agenda-setting and lobbying activities may mitigate or exacerbate economic biases in congressional representation.
The common wisdom is that low-income constituents "surrender" their political influence by a combination of poor electoral turnout, inability to provide significant monetary contributions to political campaigns, and an unwillingness or inability to contact their representatives and their staffs. Bartels performed a few preliminary statistical tests to test their common suppositions, and found "surprisingly strong and consistent evidence" that the wide gap in senators’ responsiveness to rich and poor constituents actually "are not primarily due to differences between rich and poor constituents in turnout, political knowledge, or contacting." There is stronger evidence that being able to contribute monetarily to a political campaign correlates directly with having one’s views accepted and represented effectively.
In his conclusion, Bartels also discusses the limitations of his study, and notes that the academic community has yet to mount a serious investigation into these issues, and ends with a clear warning of how representative democracy is likely being undermined by a self-reinforcing feedback loop in which the interests of low-income citizens are completely ignored, leading to legislation increasingly favorable to the wealthy, further marginalizing low-income citizens.
There is clearly a great deal more work to be done investigating the mechanisms by which economic inequality gets reproduced in the political realm. The simple assumption that the rich are more influential than the poor because they are more likely to vote receives no support in my analysis. The idea that they are more influential because they are better informed about politics and government fares equally poorly. The notion that they are more influential because they are more likely to contact government officials receives some modest support, but is clearly far from being the whole story. The even simpler assumption that the rich are more influential than the poor because they provide the contributions that fuel contemporary campaigning and lobbying activities receives somewhat stronger support; but that support is quite indirect, and the role of money in shaping public policy clearly deserves much more careful empirical examination...
. . . the sheer magnitude of the disparities in representation documented here must be troubling to anyone who accepts Dahl’s (1971, 1) stipulation that "a key characteristic of a democracy is the continued responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals." These disparities are especially troubling because they suggest the potential for a debilitating feedback cycle linking the economic and political realms: increasing economic inequality may produce increasing inequality in political responsiveness, which in turn produces public policies increasingly detrimental to the interests of poor citizens, which in turn produces even greater economic inequality, and so on. If that is the case, shifts in the income distribution triggered by exogenous technological forces may in time become augmented, entrenched, and immutable.