NOTE: Another contribution by Fred Thompson:
A recent paper by
Martin Gilens and Ben Page entitled “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites,
Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” and forthcoming Fall 2014 in Perspectives
on Politics has garnered a lot of commentary in the blogosphere. But some
have hailed the study for doing things Gilens and Page do not do: prove scientifically that America is basically
an oligarchy/plutocracy.
Moreover, while I find Gillen and Page’s empirical analysis very impressive – a
real tour de force –, it is less than fully conclusive.
On the first point, America
may well be an oligarchy/plutocracy. But Givens and Page do not claim that this
is what their analysis shows; at most they claim that their findings are
consistent with the notion that wealthy elites and businesses run things, which
they acknowledge is their view. Nevertheless, they are very careful to
distinguish between their opinions and their empirical findings.
On the second point, let’s start with what they
find and how they got there. Gilens and Page find that the preferences of economic
elites and organized groups, especially those representing business interests, influence
(to a degree) the shape and content of public policies, while those of average
citizens do not. They also find that business-oriented groups play a bigger
role in shaping policy outcomes than do other kinds of groups, primarily
because more of them are engaged on each issue (roughly twice as many, on
average), and also because they are almost always in agreement on proposed
policy changes. Both sets of findings are based upon a multivariate analysis of
1,779 cases, in which the a-priori
policy preferences of average citizens, economic elites, mass-based interest
groups, and business-oriented interest groups were regressed upon legislative
outcomes.
These findings are
interesting and plausible, but they aren’t very strong or robust. Their
strongest model has an R-squared of just over .07, which is to say, all of the
predictor variables in the analysis taken together explain only 7 percent of
the variance in legislative outcomes; taken individually none of them explain
more than 5 percent.
There is a second
reason for my questioning the conclusiveness of their findings: I don’t think
their analysis shows what they think it does. Their analysis focuses on the
shape and content of public policies, not their effects overall. It is hard for
me to see how ordinary citizens could or would want to shape the public
policies of a huge and complex government like that of the United States. Nor
does democratic theory require them to.
As Gilens and Page themselves
explain, rational choice theories of electoral democracy presume that competitive
vote-maximizing parties or candidates in a two-party system converge at the mid-point
of the distribution of voters’ most-preferred positions. Consequently, where preferences
are jointly single peaked so that they can be arrayed along a single dimension,
the public policy outcome consistent with the preferences of the median voter
is the empirically predicted equilibrium result of two-party electoral
competition.
In economics, this
outcome is usually referred to as Bowen equilibrium (after Howard Bowen, one of
my teachers in graduate school). Note, however, that the naïve median-voter
outcome is rarely an efficient outcome (the losers could compensate the winners
to move to a different place on the continuum and still be better off) and
under most straightforward sets of circumstances the inefficiency usually takes
the form undersupply of publicly provided goods and
services. In contrast, if one
accounts for side payments (think tax prices), an outcome can be imagined that
is both efficient and consistent with the median-voter result, but compared to
the voters’ starting positions, would tend to shift the policy outcome in the
direction of the preferences of those who have the most to gain/lose from the
policy outcome in question (just what Gilens and Page tend to observe).
The efficient
outcome that satisfies the median-voter outcome is, in fact, the true “Condorcet
winner:” the only outcome that would be preferred to any alternative policy in
head-to-head majority-rule voting by all voters. Except where this knife-edged
position is realized there is always an alternative position and set of side-payments
that can defeat the last head-to-head winner. Hence, it is arguably the “most
democratic” policy.
Under most rules of
order, the status quo remains in effect until the true Condorcet winner is
located or until someone brings the process to a premature conclusion. Because
the division of authority and jurisdiction in most legislative arenas permits leaders
to manage/direct the process, real-world policy choices depend not only upon the
preferences of the participants but also upon how the rules and organization of
the legislative process. This means that real-world institutional arrangements can
produce outcomes, which are neither democratic nor efficient. For example,
where concentrated, salient, short-term payoffs (pork, jobs, etc.) trump
diffuse, low-visibility, long-term consequences.
In theory, policy
outcomes also depend upon how preferences are configured. As Gilens and Page
explain: If voters’ preference orderings are not unidimensional and are sufficiently
diverse, there may be no Condorcet winner (p. 5). Economists typically finesse
this issue by assuming that any preference that matters will have measurable
consequences and that anything that can be measured can be expressed in terms
of willingness and ability to pay (money), which means that preference orderings
on any issue can be treated as unidimensional – but this may merely reflect our
own one-dimensional notions of what matters.
Gilens and Page
acknowledge that there is a version of democratic control in which deviations
from naïve or a priori policy
preferences might be entirely consistent with the outcomes they observe (also
those suggested by the informal economic theorizing above). In this version of
democratic control, the marginal voter has weak policy preferences but instead cares
about the consequences of policies – they ask only how well their interests
have been served and vote accordingly; politicians enact policies in
anticipation of those judgments. Consequently, rather than responding to citizens’
stated policy preferences, legislators are oriented to the electorate’s
interests (which is unfortunately not necessarily the same as the public
interest).
Gilens and Page
simply dismiss this possibility, both because they don’t know how to test it
and because they cannot imagine it to be true.
I am willing to
grant that elected officials often fail to pursue the public interest,
otherwise how can one possibly explain Congressional dithering over TARP in the
late summer of 2008 or the absence of further fiscal stimulus in 2010. However,
I am as inclined to attribute this to an excess of responsiveness to public
opinion with respect to policy content as to too little.
