Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age
By Larry M. Bartels
Princeton University Press
Princeton, NJ: 2008
328 pages
$29.95
... American beliefs about inequality are profoundly political in their origins and implications. Well-informed conservatives and liberals differ markedly, not only in their normative assessments of increasing inequality, as one might expect, but also in their perceptions of the causes, extent, and consequences of inequality. This is not simply a matter of people with different values drawing different conclusions from a set of agreed-upon facts. Analysts of public opinion in the realm of inequality--as in many other realms--would do well to recognize that the facts themselves are very much subject to ideological dispute. For their part, political actors in the realm of inequality--as in many other realms--would do well to recognize that careful logical arguments running from factual premises to policy conclusions are unlikely to persuade people who are ideologically motivated to distort or deny the facts. While it is certainly true, as Jennifer Hoschschild has argued, that "Where You Stand Depends on What You See," it is equally true that what you see depends in significant part on where you stand.
A challenge to conventional wisdom--including, specifically, many strains of liberal conventional wisdom--Unequal Democracy is a flat-out wonkfest of statistics, charts, tables and (thankfully) Larry Bartels' patient hand-holding and explanations of the mass of data that points to the undeniable realities of class in our society and how that affects our political system.
And as most readers at Daily Kos could probably guess, news is not good on the class front, in many cases in unanticipated ways. Just a few of the conventional wisdom-busters Bartels discusses in Unequal Democracy include:
- Americans hate the estate tax, and they did long before the right wing changed it to the "death tax."
- Politics matters. A lot. There is a huge difference between Republican and Democratic policies that affect the pocketbooks of middle-class and working-class Americans.
- Contrary to popular belief, working-class whites (outside of the South) have not deserted the Democratic Party--affluent whites have.
- Economic issues still vastly outweigh cultural/social issues when it comes time to cast a vote.
- To the extent that social issues have increased in importance, it is only so for the affluent white voter, not the working class.
- Gaps between the classes are at least equal to--and often exceeding--those found in Europe.
- The more informed the voter, the more pessimistic he or she is.
- Low-information conservatives and low-information liberals are virtually indistinguishable in their beliefs; high-information ideologues of both stripes differ greatly.
- Self-identified Democrats and Republicans differ more in perception about America's economic opportunity than the actual rich and actual poor do.
Bartels makes use of a wide variety of studies and surveys taken over the past several decades--most frequently the National Election Survey, taken each election cycle. Through statistics, he is able to track both realities about class, economics and politics in the United States and, perhaps more importantly, perceptions about the same topics.
For the most part, he pursues understanding of class and associated attitudes through the lens of three policy issues: the estate tax, the Bush tax cuts and the minimum wage. Each issue is given its own chapter, and implications and perceptions of the policies are explored in depth, with attention paid to the breakdown of respondents along economic lines.
Unsurprisingly--and as other commentators have noted previously--Americans of every class hold opinions more in line with progressive values than conservative ones. And it also should come as no surprise to anyone who's followed politics closely for any amount of time that voters often hold conflicting opinions: for example, the same person who declares to pollsters that he or she wants a tax cut is the very same person who wants more spent on education.
And attitudes, Bartels finds, remain strikingly consistent over time, despite the narrative propagated by the Republican Party--and more specifically, the Christian right--that the nation has become vastly more conservative over the past couple of decades. Not so, the author claims; only a very small stratum appears to have edged to the right:
... the truth of the matter is that mass opinion often bears rather little connection to the tidy ideological landscape that political elites take for granted. Thus, while ideological debate among elected officials and public intellectuals does seem to have shifted significantly to the right over the past 30 years, it is far from obvious that the political views of ordinary citizens have become noticeably more conservative.
Nowhere is this trend more noticeable than on the question of abortion. What opinion shift to the right has been detected comes from an unexpected segment of the population:
The other important pattern to note ... is that the increase in issue weights for cultural issues over the past 20 years is largest among high-income voters, not among low-income voters. This disparity is especially apparent in the case of abortion, which became vastly more important among affluent white voters but showed little or no increase in importance among those in the bottom third of the income distribution. Contrary to much elite rhetoric regarding the partisan significance of "moral values," the rise of cultural issues has mostly affected relatively affluent (and culturally liberal) white voters, not culturally conservative low-income whites.
Another surprise crops up with surveys of attitudes regarding the Bush tax cuts. While most voters agree that the rich don't pay their share in taxes, what most influences whether someone supported the cuts was not attitudes toward the wealthy. Instead, it was whether the person surveyed felt he or she was paying too much in taxes. This held true--and this is the important part--even when the respondent understood that they were not going to benefit from the tax cut. This attitude, coupled with other tendencies, means that egalitarianism in this country is one of those values that everyone professes to honor in the abstract, but betray in the breach:
... it seems clear that voters' inaccessibility to long views, their tendency to see only present advantages, and their "materialist dream" of economic solidarity with the upper class all create important failures of economic accountability in the American electoral process.
What rings through all the research and analysis, loud and clear, is how very, very much better the fortunes of the working and middle classes fare under Democratic presidents (and Congresses as well, but mostly Democratic presidents). Bartels looks closely at the periods in various administrations when presidents are most likely to have their agenda adopted--the first year after election.
The dramatic differences in output and income growth associated with Democratic and Republican "honeymoon" periods are a testament to the ability of presidents in the post-Keynesian era to shape the economy to their partisan ends. Democratic presidents have routinely used these periods to produce vibrant economic growth for families in every part of the income distribution; in contrast, Republicans have routinely presided over economic contractions and declining incomes for middle-class and poor families. Partisan differences in macroeconomic priorities and performance have clearly had a very significant impact on the economic fortunes of American families over the past half century, and that impact has been especially marked at the point in the electoral cycle when presidents are most politically influential.
This finding is important, especially for those of us deeply involved in day-to-day partisan politics who can get discouraged, thinking there is not one whit of difference between the two parties. There is, and Bartels has the statistics to prove it, and a book we should be thankful he published.
In his own words; The most important lesson of this book is a very simple one: politics matters.