Affluence and influence: economic inequality and political power in America

The most prevalent approach, often labeled “dyadic representation,” examines the relationship between constituency opinion and the behavior of representatives or candidates across political units like U.S. states or congressional districts.81 This work typically finds strong correlations between constituents’ preferences and legislators’ voting behavior.

A second approach examines changes over time in public preferences and the corresponding changes (or lack of changes) in public policies. For example, if support for spending on space exploration declines over some period of time, does actual spending on the space program also decline? Using this technique, Page and Shapiro found fairly high levels of congruence between the direction of change in opinion and the direction of change in government policy, especially for salient issues or cases with large changes in public preferences.82 Robert Erikson, Michael MacKuen, and James Stimson also related changes in public preferences to subsequent government policy.83 Rather than focusing on individual policy issues, however, Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson used a broad measure of “public mood” concerning the size and scope of government and a similarly broad measure of actual government policy. Taking into account the reciprocal relationship between public preferences and government policy, they report an extremely strong influence of public mood on policy outputs, concluding that there exists “nearly a one-to-one translation of preferences into policy.”

Finally, using a third approach, Alan Monroe compared public preferences for policy change expressed at a given time with subsequent changes (or lack of changes) in government policy.85 For example, if the public expresses a preference for cutting spending on space exploration at a given time, does actual spending on the space program decline in the following years? Monroe found only modest consistency between public preferences and subsequent policy change during the 1960s and 1970s and even less consistency during 1980s and 1990s. Mirroring Page and Shapiro’s results, however, Monroe found a better match between public preferences and government policy for issues that the public deemed more important.

These two techniques for estimating the independent influence of Americans with differing incomes produce very similar results. In both cases the association between government policy and the preferences of lowand middle-income Americans is weak and not significant, while the association for high-income Americans is strong and highly significant.

two kinds of evidence suggest that high-income Americans do not hold stronger views of policy issues or consider such issues to be more important to them. First, surveys occasionally ask respondents to indicate their policy preferences and then to report how important that policy issue is to them. The 2004 American National Election Study, for example, asked a series of questions about gun control, government health insurance, defense spending, aid to black people, and environmental protection. Each policy item was followed by a question asking, “How important is this issue to you personally?” with five options ranging from “extremely important” to “not at all important.” The patterns differed slightly across these five issues, with gun control eliciting slightly greater “personal importance” ratings from low-income Americans and health insurance slightly greater importance from those with high incomes. But averaged across the issues, low-, middle-, and high-income respondents expressed nearly identical levels of importance; the percentage indicating these issues were “extremely” or “very” important to them was 58, 61, and 58 percent for low-, middle-, and high-income Americans, respectively. The second indication that high-income Americans are no more fervent in their policy preferences than those of more modest means comes from the subset of my data that contains measures of both direction and strength of preference. One hundred sixty of my survey questions ask respondents to indicate not only their support or opposition to the proposed policy change, but whether they support or oppose that change “strongly” or only “somewhat.” The bottom panel in figure 3.7 shows no difference across income levels in the propensity of respondents to say they “strongly” as opposed to “somewhat” favor or oppose a given policy.

federal funding for stem cell research was arguably more consistent with the preferences of lower and middle-income Americans