Political Inequality: Challenges and Opportunities

by Martin Gilens

In the following pages I briefly reflect on three related aspects of political inequality: political parties,
inequality of political influence, and electoral reform. I also point to three areas of particular promise for
future research on the challenges facing American democracy: the US states, social movements, and
campaign finance regulations.

Parties and polarization. The two issues that stand out most clearly to me with regard to the parties are
polarization and “capture” by activists and interest groups. The Democratic and Republican parties have
become more internally homogenous and more distinct from each other over the past 40 years (with
somewhat more movement on both dimensions for the Republicans). Why this has happened and what
the consequences are is not entirely clear. Some popular potential explanations for party polarization
appear to play little or no role, including primary elections, increased geographic (state or congressional
district) homogeneity, gerrymandering, and issue polarization among the public. Potential explanations
left standing include (1) growing economic inequality and the greater importance of economic
considerations in party identification and vote choice, (2) the divergence of party positions on racial and
“social” issues (e.g., abortion, gay rights), and (3) the shifting of party control from office‐seeking
collections of “professional politicians” to more ideological and interest‐driven activists and interest
groups.

One widely (but not universally) perceived consequence of partisan polarization is a strategy of partisan
obstructionism and gridlock. To date, obstructionism has played a greater role in the Republican Party’s
approach to governing. How much this is a result of Republican elites’ greater ideological homogeneity,
the particularities of recent administrations, or the divergent political preferences of the parties (e.g., the
Republicans’ general preference for “less government”), or other factors, is uncertain. In any case, the
specter of polarized and obstructionist parties undermining the government’s ability to address pressing
economic, environmental, and social issues, is one very understandable source of “democratic anxiety.”

Irrespective of the impact of partisan polarization on policymaking, polarization appears to be

contributing to a more hostile rhetorical environment. At the same time, the emergence of cable TV and
the internet have created a media environment in which “broadcasting” has given way to
“narrowcasting.” Centrist news outlets like the once dominant nightly network news shows (and CNN)
have lost viewers and more opinionated and politically polarized news sources have grown in popularity.
Thus technological and economic changes in the media environment have facilitated and reinforced the
hostile rhetoric that troubles many observers.

Do these changes in the nature of public discourse matter? There is little evidence that the American
public has become more extreme in its policy views. But partisan identifiers are both more distinct from
each other (due to easier sorting allowed by more homogenous parties) and more likely to express
hostile views of the other party. Even if the partisan sniping and disparagement that characterizes
opinionated news shows has not led many members of the public to adopt more extremist views, this
rhetorical environment might well present an obstacle to mobilizing broad coalitions for political change
that might otherwise be possible. For example, policies to broaden political influence (such as campaign
finance reform) or bolster the middle class (such support for education or job creation) are vulnerable to
opposition from partisan elites who have other priorities. When a substantial portion of politically
involved Americans receive their information from strongly partisan sources, the ability of those partisan
elites to undermine broadly beneficial policies is heightened.

Related to polarization is the notion that the parties have been captured by (or at least are more
dependent on support from) interest groups and from their comparatively extremist activist bases. From
this perspective, control has shifted from Downsian office seeking “professional” politicians whose policy
preferences were secondary to their desire to obtain and retain office, to “policy demanding” groups and
(affluent) individuals for whom electoral victory is valued only as a means to achieving policy goals.
Another source of anxiety, then, is the concern that not only are parties unable to make policy
compromises due to dependence on these policy demanders, but that moneyed interests and narrow
“single issue” subgroups of the public are pulling policy away from the interests and preferences of the
majority of Americans.

Political inequality and policy responsiveness. Following from the above, a second set of concerns focus
on policymakers’ lack of responsiveness to the preferences of the public. Recent work (including my
own) suggests that federal policy responds fairly strongly to the preferences of the affluent, but weakly if
at all to those of the middle‐class or the poor. It remains uncertain exactly how affluent (and how
narrow) the group of Americans that wield influence over policymaking is. 1 The lack of responsiveness
to all but high‐income Americans extends across all policy domains but is perhaps most evident and
most concerning with regard to economic policy (where the prospect of a vicious cycle exists in which
existing economic inequalities generate public policies that reinforce and exacerbate those inequalities).
The feeble regulatory reforms following the economic crash of 2007/08, and the lack of political will to
adequately address the extremely uneven recovery that has followed, reflect the dominant influence of
moneyed interests in shaping government policy.

Formal electoral rules that influence voting and representation may play some small part in explaining
the lack of policy responsiveness to public preferences (e.g., voting rights, felon disenfranchisement,
districting laws). But lower voter turnout among less advantaged citizens does appear to account for the
lack of responsiveness to their preferences. More encouragingly, I found that the massive inequality in
responsiveness to the preferences of more and less well‐off Americans is reduced during presidential
election years. Politicians need money to obtain and retain office, but they also need votes, and the
impact of the electoral cycle on representation suggests both the political system as it currently exists
responds (somewhat, and sometimes) to voters’ interests and desires and that electoral reforms might
hold promise for increasing the responsiveness of our government to the needs of its citizens.

Electoral reform. Reforms that reduce barriers to voting are desirable as a matter of basic justice and as
part of broader efforts to increase political interest and engagement among a largely unengaged public.
But as I suggested above, I do not expect such reforms to have substantial impact on the content or
amount of federal policymaking. Reducing the role of money in politics may be a more promising‐‐if even
more challenging‐‐avenue of reform. This is a notoriously difficult task (often likened to squeezing a
balloon) and recent court decisions have made it even more daunting. But numerous clever proposals
have been offered to get around first amendment concerns, and the US states offer a range of models of
“clean election” and public finance models. To my knowledge, there is little hard evidence that state
campaign finance regulations have dramatically altered either the nature of elections or state
policymaking, but there are hints of such effects and this remains a promising area for further research.
2

Directions for future research. As the brief overviews above suggest, any effort to understand and
address the challenges facing American democracy will benefit from greater insight into the causes and
consequences of political polarization, the nature of political parties, and the conditions that enhance or
retard policy responsiveness to public preferences.

One promising research direction looks to the US states. Not only is there the obvious advantage of a 50
times larger sample compared with studies of the federal government, but recent advances in data and
analysis techniques have created new opportunities. For example, ideal point estimates of state
legislators have recently become available as have multi‐level modeling techniques for estimating state
public opinion and other characteristics from national data.

A second promising direction concerns the role of social movements in drawing public attention to
specific issues, generating political pressure to address those issues, and encouraging political
engagement. Social movements have been studied by sociologists but severely neglected by political
scientists. The twin examples of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street may help illuminate some of the
possibilities and pitfalls of social movements in the current era. This effort would surely benefit, too,
from a broader historical reach that includes not only the numerous (fairly successful) American social
movements of the 1960s and 1970s, but those of earlier decades and other countries.

Finally, campaign finance reform would appear to be one of the few policy levers that might hold
substantial promise for redressing some of the shortcomings of American democracy across a wide range
of substantive (and procedural) areas. Advocates of campaign finance reform often portray it—not
unreasonably—as the “big problem” that underlies the numerous “little problems” of health care,
education, economic reform, environmental protection, and so on. It’s unclear what effective campaign
finance reform might look like and whether it is achievable. But to the extent that the needs and desires
of middle‐class Americans are not served by the political parties and are not reflected in government
policy, most citizens will rightly feel that their government does not “belong” to them

My research contrasts the 90th income percentile with the less well-off, while Larry Bartels uses
income terciles in his analyses. Bartels, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded
Age. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.Ben Page and Bartels are currently attempting to survey
the political preferences and activities of a much smaller segment of truly rich Americans but to date
only have data from a small pilot survey. ↩
 For example, state campaign finance regulations have been shown to be related to the equality of
resources between incumbents and challengers, incumbents’ vote shares, voter turnout levels, and the
proportions of Democrats and women in state legislatures. ↩

Posted on May 30th, 2014.

About the Author

Martin Gilens is professor of politics at Princeton University.