Economic Inequality and Political Representation

Economic Inequality and Political Representation 1 One of the most basic principles of democracy is the notion that every citizen's preferences should count equally in the realm of politics and government. As Robert Dahl (1971, 1) put it, "a key characteristic of a democracy is the continued responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals." But there are a variety of good reasons to believe that citizens are not considered as political equals by policy-makers in real political systems. Wealthier and better-educated citizens are more likely than the poor and less- educated to have well-formulated and well-informed preferences, significantly more likely to turn out to vote, much more likely to have direct contact with public officials, and much more likely to contribute money and energy to political campaigns. These disparities in political resources and action raise a profound question posed by Dahl (1961) on the first page of another classic study: "In a political system where nearly every adult may vote but where knowledge, wealth, social position, access to officials, and other resources are unequally distributed, who actually governs? " The significance of Dahl's question has been magnified by economic and political developments in the United States in the decades since he posed it. On one hand, the shape of the U.S. income distribution has changed markedly, with substantial gains in real income at the top outpacing much more modest gains among middle- and low-income earners. For example, the average real income of the top quintile of American households increased by more than $57,000 (64 percent) between 1975 and 2003, while the average real income of the middle quintile increased by about $8,000 (23 percent) and the average real income of the poorest quintile increased by $853 (less than 10 percent).2 The increasingly unequal distribution of income - and the even more unequal distribution of wealth - are problematic for a democratic system to the extent that economic inequality engenders political inequality. At the same time, the political process has evolved in ways that may be detrimental to the interests of citizens of modest means. Political campaigns have become dramatically more expensive since the 1950s, increasing the reliance of elected officials on people who can afford to help finance their bids for re-election. Lobbying activities by corporations and business and professional organizations have accelerated greatly, outpacing the growth of public interest groups. And membership in labor unions has declined substantially, eroding the primary mechanism for organized representation of blue collar workers in the governmental process. An APSA task force recently concluded that political scientists know "astonishingly little" about the "cumulative effects on American democracy" of these and other developments, but worried "that rising economic inequality will solidify longstanding disparities in political voice and influence, and perhaps exacerbate such disparities" (Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy 2004, 662).One aspect of political inequality that has been unusually well-documented (for example, by Verba, Nie, and Kim 1978; Wolfinger and Rosenstone 1980; Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995) is the disparity between rich and poor citizens in political participation. Studies of participatory inequality seem to be inspired in significant part by the presumption that participation has important consequences for representation. As Verba, Schlozman, and Brady (1995, 14) put it, "inequalities in activity are likely to be associated with inequalities in governmental responsiveness." It is striking, though, how little political scientists have done to test that presumption. For the most part, scholars of political participation have treated actual patterns of governmental responsiveness as someone else's problem. Meanwhile, statistical studies of political representation dating back to the classic analysis of Miller and Stokes (1963) have found strong connections between constituents' policy preferences and their representatives' policy choices (for example, Page and Shapiro 1983; Bartels 1991; Stimson, MackKuen, and Erikson 1995) . However, those studies have almost invariably treated constituents in an undifferentiated way, using simple averages of opinions in a given district, on a given issue, or at a given time to account for representatives' policy choices.3 Thus, they shed little or no light on the fundamental issue of political equality. My aim here is to provide a more nuanced analysis of political representation in which the weight attached to constituents' views in the policy-making process is allowed to depend on those constituents' politically relevant resources and behavior - primarily on their incomes, and secondarily on a variety of other resources and behaviors that might mediate the relationship between income and political representation, including electoral turnout, political information, and contact with public officials.download