Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age - Second Edition
424
Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age - Second Edition
424Hardcover(Second)
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Overview
The first edition of Unequal Democracy was an instant classic, shattering illusions about American democracy and spurring scholarly and popular interest in the political causes and consequences of escalating economic inequality. This revised, updated, and expanded second edition includes two new chapters on the political economy of the Obama era. One presents the Great Recession as a "stress test" of the American political system by analyzing the 2008 election and the impact of Barack Obama's "New New Deal" on the economic fortunes of the rich, middle class, and poor. The other assesses the politics of inequality in the wake of the Occupy Wall Street movement, the 2012 election, and the partisan gridlock of Obama’s second term. Larry Bartels offers a sobering account of the barriers to change posed by partisan ideologies and the political power of the wealthy. He also provides new analyses of tax policy, partisan differences in economic performance, the struggle to raise the minimum wage, and inequalities in congressional representation.
President Obama identified inequality as "the defining challenge of our time." Unequal Democracy is the definitive account of how and why our political system has failed to rise to that challenge. Now more than ever, this is a book every American needs to read.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691172842 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/04/2016 |
| Series: | Russell Sage Foundation Co-pub |
| Edition description: | Second |
| Pages: | 424 |
| Sales rank: | 780,333 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Unequal Democracy
The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age
By Larry M. Bartels
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Russell Sage FoundationAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-17284-2
CHAPTER 1
The New Gilded Age
In the first sentence of one of the greatest works of modern political science, Robert Dahl posed a question of profound importance for democratic theory and practice: "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?"
Dahl's answer to this question, for one American city in the late 1950s, was that political power was surprisingly widely dispersed. Examining politics and policy-making in New Haven, Connecticut, he concluded that shifting, largely distinct coalitions of elected and unelected leaders influenced key decisions in different issue areas. This pluralistic pattern was facilitated by the fact that many individuals and groups with substantial resources at their disposal chose not to devote those resources to political activity. Even "economic notables" — the wealthy property owners, businessmen, and bank directors constituting the top tier of New Haven's economic elite — were "simply one of the many groups out of which individuals sporadically emerge to influence the policies and acts of city officials."
The significance of Dahl's question has been magnified, and the pertinence of his answer has been cast in doubt, by dramatic economic and political changes in the United States over the past half-century. Economically, America has become vastly richer and vastly more unequal. Perhaps most strikingly, the share of total income going to people at the level of Dahl's "economic notables" — the top 0.1% of income-earners — has tripled, from 3.3% in the late 1950s to 10.3% in 2014. The share going to the top 1% of income-earners — a much broader but still very affluent group — doubled over the same period, from 10.4% to 21.2%. The nation's wealth is even more concentrated, with the wealthiest 1% of households holding 41.8% and the wealthiest 0.1% holding 22.0%. It seems natural to wonder whether the pluralistic democracy Dahl found in the 1950s has survived this rapidly escalating concentration of economic resources in the hands of America's most affluent citizens.
Meanwhile, the political process has evolved in ways that seem likely to reinforce the advantages of wealth. 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 reelection. Major campaign finance regulations imposed in response to the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s have been significantly weakened by a series of Supreme Court decisions — most notably in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010 — chipping away at contribution limits and allowing unlimited contributions to "super PACs" engaged in putatively independent campaign expenditures. Even more importantly, lobbying activities by corporations and business and professional organizations have accelerated greatly, outpacing the growth of public interest groups. Meanwhile, membership in labor unions has declined substantially, eroding the primary mechanism for organized representation of working people in the governmental process.
How have these economic and political developments affected "who actually governs"? Political scientists since Aristotle have wrestled with the question of whether substantial economic inequality is compatible with democracy, but until recently that question was far from the forefront of contemporary empirical research. In 2004, a task force on inequality and American democracy convened by the American Political Science Association concluded that political scientists knew "astonishingly little" about the "cumulative effects on American democracy" of recent economic and political changes. However, the task force members worried "that rising economic inequality will solidify longstanding disparities in political voice and influence, and perhaps exacerbate such disparities."
The work of the APSA task force helped to stimulate a substantial body of new research focusing on economic inequality and American democracy. While that work is far from complete, and much of it remains controversial, political scientists have made real progress in tracing the political consequences of economic inequality. Their findings suggest that elected officials and public policy are largely unresponsive to the policy preferences of millions of low-income citizens, leaving their political interests to be served or ignored as the ideological whims of incumbent elites may dictate. Dahl suggested that democracy entails "continued responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals." The contemporary United States is a very long way from meeting that standard.
While it has become increasingly clear that economic inequality has profound ramifications for democratic politics, that is only half the story of this book. The other half of the story is that politics also profoundly shapes economics. While technological change, globalization, demographic shifts, and other economic and social forces have produced powerful pressures toward greater inequality in recent decades, politics and public policy can and do significantly reinforce or mitigate those pressures, depending on the political aims and priorities of elected officials. I trace the impact of public policies on changes in the U.S. income distribution over almost seven decades, from the tripled income share of Dahl's "economic notables" at the top to the plight of minimum wage workers at the bottom. I find that partisan politics and the ideological convictions of political elites have had a substantial impact on the American economy, especially on the economic fortunes of middle-class and poor people. Economic inequality is, in substantial part, a political phenomenon.
In theory, public opinion constrains the ideological convictions of political elites in democratic political systems. In practice, however, elected officials have a great deal of political leeway. This fact is strikingly illustrated by the behavior of Democratic and Republican senators from the same state, who routinely pursue vastly different policies while "representing" precisely the same constituents. On a broader historical scale, political latitude is also demonstrated by consistent, marked shifts in economic priorities and performance when Democrats replace Republicans, or when Republicans replace Democrats, in the White House. In these respects, among others, conventional democratic theory misses much of what is most interesting and important about the actual workings of the American political system.
My examination of the partisan politics of economic inequality, in chapter 2, reveals that Democratic and Republican presidents since the late 1940s have presided over dramatically different patterns of income growth. On average, the real incomes of middle-class families have grown more than twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working poor families have grown ten times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans. These substantial partisan differences persist even after allowing for differences in economic circumstances and historical trends beyond the control of individual presidents. They demonstrate that escalating inequality is not simply an inevitable economic trend — and that a great deal of economic inequality in the contemporary United States is specifically attributable to the policies and priorities of Republican presidents.
Any satisfactory account of the American political economy must therefore explain how and why Republicans have had so much success in the American electoral arena despite their startlingly negative impact on the economic fortunes of middle-class and poor people. My analysis in chapter 3 identifies three distinct biases in political accountability that explain much of their success. One is a myopic focus of voters on very recent economic performance, which rewards Republicans' surprising success in concentrating income growth in election years. Another is the peculiar sensitivity of voters at all income levels to high-income growth rates, which rewards Republicans' success in generating election-year income growth among affluent families specifically. Finally, the responsiveness of voters to campaign spending rewards Republicans' frequent advantage in fundraising. Together, these biases probably account three times over for the Republican Party's net advantage in popular votes cast in presidential elections since the end of World War II — and for four of the nine instances in which Republicans won the White House. Voters' seemingly straightforward tendency to reward or punish the incumbent government at the polls for good or bad economic performance turns out to be warped in ways that are both fascinating and politically crucial.
In chapter 4, I turn to citizens' views about equality; their attitudes toward salient economic groups such as rich people, poor people, big business, and labor unions; and their perceptions of the extent, causes, and consequences of economic inequality in contemporary America. My analysis reveals considerable concern about inequality among ordinary Americans and considerable sympathy for working-class and poor people. However, it also reveals a good deal of ignorance and misconnection between values, beliefs, and policy preferences among people who pay relatively little attention to politics and public affairs, and a good deal of politically motivated misperception among better-informed people. As a result, political elites retain considerable latitude to pursue their own policy ends.
Chapters 5, 6, and 7 provide a series of case studies of politics and policymaking in issue areas with important ramifications for economic inequality. Chapter 5 focuses on the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, which dramatically reduced the federal tax burdens of wealthy Americans. I find that public opinion regarding the Bush tax cuts was remarkably shallow and confused considering the multi-trillion-dollar stakes. A year after the 2001 tax cut took effect, 40% of the public said they had not thought about whether they favored or opposed it, and those who did take a position did so largely on the basis of how they felt about their own tax burden. Views about the tax burden of the rich had no apparent impact on public opinion, despite the fact that most of the benefits went to affluent taxpayers; egalitarian values reduced support for the tax cut, but only among strong egalitarians who were also politically well informed.
Chapter 6 focuses on the campaign to repeal the federal estate tax. As with the Bush tax cuts more generally, I find that repeal of the estate tax has been remarkably popular among ordinary Americans, regardless of their political views and economic circumstances, and despite the fact that the vast majority of them never have been or would be subject to estate taxation. Moreover, the strange appeal of estate tax repeal long predates the efforts of conservative interest groups in the 1990s to manufacture public opposition to the estate tax. Thus, the real political mystery is not why the estate tax was temporarily phased out in 2001, but why it has survived for nearly a century despite the public's antipathy. The simple answer is that the views of liberal elites determined to prevent repeal have been more consequential than the views of ordinary citizens.
In chapter 7, I turn from wealthy heirs to working poor people and the eroding minimum wage. Here, too, the views of ordinary citizens seem to have had remarkably little impact on public policy. The real value of the federal minimum wage has declined by one-third since the late 1960s, despite remarkably strong and consistent public support for minimum wage increases. My analysis attributes this erosion to the declining political clout of labor unions and to shifts in partisan control of Congress and the White House. As with the estate tax, the politics of the minimum wage underscores the ability of determined elites in the American political system to postpone or prevent policy shifts. However, in this case the determined elites have not been liberal Democrats intent on taxing the bequests of millionaires, but conservative Republicans intent on protecting the free market (and low-wage employers) from the predations of people earning $7.25 per hour. Conversely, the adoption of higher state-specific minimum wage rates has mostly hinged upon the political strength of unions and Democratic politicians rather than mass opinion, even in states with initiative and referendum procedures.
My case studies of the Bush tax cuts, estate tax repeal, and the eroding minimum wage shed light on both the political causes and the political consequences of escalating economic inequality in contemporary America. In chapter 8, I attempt to provide a more general answer to Dahl's fundamental question: who governs? I examine broad patterns of policy-making across a wide range of issues, focusing on disparities in the responsiveness of elected officials to the views of their constituents. I find that the roll call votes cast by members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives are much better accounted for by their own partisanship than by the preferences of their constituents. Moreover, insofar as constituents' views do matter, political influence seems to be limited mostly to affluent and middle-class people. In the case of senators, the opinions of millions of ordinary citizens in the bottom one-third of the income distribution have no discernible impact on the behavior of their elected representatives.
Chapters 9 and 10 carry the analysis through the Obama era. In chapter 9, I examine the responses of policy-makers and citizens to the greatest economic calamity of our time, the Great Recession. Many observers expected the economic crisis to shift American politics significantly to the left. It did contribute to the dramatic election of Barack Obama, whose response to the recession underlined once again the significance of partisan ideologies in shaping public policy. However, voters' predictable impatience with a slow economic recovery and their predictable resistance to ideological overreach combined with the intransigence of Republicans in Congress to constrain and then stifle Obama's "New New Deal." Meanwhile, the persistent tendency of policy-makers to see the world through privileged eyes — personified by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's perceptions and judgments during and after the tumultuous Wall Street meltdown — arguably tilted economic policy in favor of wealthy interests at the expense of ordinary Americans.
In chapter 10, I assess the politics of inequality in the wake of the Great Recession, the rise and fall of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and President Obama's high-profile rhetoric identifying inequality as "the defining challenge of our time." My analysis suggests that these developments have had remarkably little impact on Americans' perceptions and values regarding inequality, on their policy preferences, and on their voting behavior. Even a presidential election in which "the chasm between the rich and ordinary workers" became "a crucial talking point in the Democratic Party's arsenal" turned much less on voters' views about taxing the wealthy than on their perceptions of the Republican nominee as an out-of-touch plutocrat.
Writing in the 1980s, at an early stage in the most recent wave of escalating inequality, political scientists Sidney Verba and Gary Orren depicted an ongoing back-and-forth between the powerful forces of economic inequality and political equality: "Political equality ... poses a constant challenge to economic inequality as disadvantaged groups petition the state for redress. Egalitarian demands lead to equalizing legislation, such as the progressive income tax. But the continuing disparities in the economic sphere work to limit the effectiveness of such laws, as the economically advantaged groups unleash their greater resources in the political sphere. These groups lobby for tax loopholes, hire lawyers and accountants to maximize their benefit from tax laws, and then deduct the costs."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Unequal Democracy by Larry M. Bartels. Copyright © 2016 Russell Sage Foundation. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Preface to the Second Edition xi
Preface to the First Edition xv
1 The New Gilded Age 1
Escalating Economic Inequality 7
Interpreting Inequality 16
Economic Inequality as a Political Issue 23
Inequality and American Democracy 28
2 The Partisan Political Economy 33
Partisan Patterns of Income Growth 35
A Partisan Coincidence? 38
Partisan Differences in Macroeconomic Policy 48
Macroeconomic Performance and Income Growth 52
Do Presidents Still Matter? 57
Partisan Redistribution 62
Democrats, Republicans, and the Rise of Inequality 69
3 Partisan Biases in Economic Accountability 74
Myopic Voters 76
The Electoral Timing of Income Growth 82
Class Biases in Economic Voting 87
The Wealthy Give Something Back: Partisan Biases in Campaign Spending 93
The Political Consequences of Biased Accountability 98
4 Do Americans Care about Inequality? 105
Egalitarian Values 108
Rich and Poor 113
Perceptions of Inequality 118
Facts and Values in the Realm of Inequality 124
5 Homer Gets a Tax Cut 136
The Bush Tax Cuts 138
Public Support for the Tax Cuts 144
Unenlightened Self-Interest 150
The Impact of Political Information 155
The Long Sunset 163
6 The Strange Appeal of Estate Tax Repeal 170
Public Support for Estate Tax Repeal 173
Is Public Support for Repeal a Product of Misinformation? 181
Did Interest Groups Manufacture Public Antipathy to the Estate Tax? 189
Elite Ideology and the Politics of Estate Tax Repeal 193
7 The Eroding Minimum Wage 198
The Economic Effects of the Minimum Wage 202
Public Support for the Minimum Wage 205
The Politics of Congressional Inaction 209
Democrats, Unions, and the Eroding Minimum Wage 217
Local Action 223
The Earned Income Tax Credit 228
8 Economic Inequality and Political Representation 233
Congressional Representation 235
Unequal Responsiveness 239
Partisan Differences in Responsiveness 248
Systemic Responsiveness 249
Plutocracy? 254
Why the Poor Are Unrepresented 257
9 Stress Test: The Political Economy of the Great Recession 269
The 2008 Election and “the New New Deal” 274
Reaction and Gridlock 281
The Political Impact of the Recession 286
But Did It Work? 295
Geithner’s World 301
Not the New New Deal 305
10 The Defining Challenge of Our Time? 309
A “National Conversation”? 311
The Class War Gets Personal: Inequality as an Issue in the 2012 Campaign 315
Obama and Inequality 329
The Political Challenge 334
11 Unequal Democracy 342
Who Governs? 344
Partisan Politics and the “Have-nots” 347
Political Obstacles to Economic Equality 352
The City of Utmost Necessity 358
Postscript 365
References 367
Index 385
What People are Saying About This
Unequal Democracy completes the story of why America's wealthy have become superrich. As Larry Bartels, one of the nation's top political scientists, convincingly demonstrates, the rich get richer when the Republicans are in power and when the less affluent fail to vote. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants answers to why so many of America's working- and middle-class families are struggling to get by.
— Thomas E. Patterson, Harvard University
Economists tend to see economic inequality as the unhappy but unavoidable result of markets—working-class people have to become relatively poorer because they are competing in a globalized world. This book suggests that economists are wrong and that the growing inequality in America is not the product of world forces but of Republican administrations during which income grows more slowly, inequality soars, and no one notices because they pump up the economy during election years. Low-income people have very little influence but which party is in power makes a vast difference for their fate. If you care about economic justice, you need to seriously examine the powerful data in this book and recognize that we can choose a better, fairer society.
— Gary Orfield, University of California, Los Angeles
“This book suggests that economists are wrong and that the growing inequality in America is not the product of world forces but of Republican administrations during which income grows more slowly, inequality soars, and no one notices because they pump up the economy during election years. If you care about economic justice, you need to seriously examine the powerful data in this book and recognize that we can choose a better, fairer society.”—Gary Orfield, University of California, Los Angeles“This is a fantastic book, a real tour de force. It is a hugely important study of increasing economic inequality in America and the failure of the political system to mitigate its effects on poor citizens. It is the best work that has been done on the political economy of income inequality.”—Thomas Mann, Brookings Institution“Unequal Democracy is the sort of book to which every political scientist should aspire—it is methodologically rigorous, conceptually serious, and above all, it addresses urgent concerns of our fellow citizens. As Bartels shows, much of what we think we know about the politics of economic inequality is dead wrong. Bartels’s perplexing and often unexpected discoveries should help refocus the gathering public debate about inequality and what to do about it.”—Robert D. Putnam, author of Bowling Alone“Unequal Democracy completes the story of why America’s wealthy have become superrich. As Larry Bartels, one of the nation’s top political scientists, convincingly demonstrates, the rich get richer when the Republicans are in power and when the less affluent fail to vote. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants answers to why so many of America’s working- and middle-class families are struggling to get by.”—Thomas E. Patterson, Harvard University“No political scientist is more widely or rightly respected than Larry Bartels, and Unequal Democracy is a brilliant book that only he could have written. The book proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the main fault for sizable socioeconomic inequalities in America lies not in our economy but in our increasingly polarized and partisan politics. With intellectual force, Unequal Democracy pulls back the sheets on Washington’s pamper-the-rich policy process and offers ideas about how we can do better by average citizens and the poor. It is Bartels at his very best, and his very best is the best there is.”—John J. DiIulio, Jr., University of Pennsylvania, former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives
No political scientist is more widely or rightly respected than Larry Bartels, and Unequal Democracy is a brilliant book that only he could have written. The book proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the main fault for sizable socioeconomic inequalities in America lies not in our economy but in our increasingly polarized and partisan politics. With intellectual force, Unequal Democracy pulls back the sheets on Washington's pamper-the-rich policy process and offers ideas about how we can do better by average citizens and the poor. It is Bartels at his very best, and his very best is the best there is.
— John J. DiIulio, Jr., University of Pennsylvania, former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives
This is a fantastic book, a real tour de force. It is a hugely important study of increasing economic inequality in America and the failure of the political system to mitigate its effects on poor citizens. It is the best work that has been done on the political economy of income inequality.
— Thomas Mann, Brookings Institution
Unequal Democracy is the sort of book to which every political scientist should aspire—it is methodologically rigorous, conceptually serious, and above all, it addresses urgent concerns of our fellow citizens. As Bartels shows, much of what we think we know about the politics of economic inequality is dead wrong. Bartels's perplexing and often unexpected discoveries should help refocus the gathering public debate about inequality and what to do about it.
— Robert D. Putnam, author of "Bowling Alone"