Billionaires and Stealth Politics

Page, Benjamin I.; Seawright, Jason; Lacombe, Matthew J.

doi:10.7208/chicago/9780226586267.001.0001

Cited by 54 publications

(24 citation statements)

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“…Rising inequality has important political implications (Stiglitz, ). High inequality also undermines political equality, enhancing the influence that the wealthy have over public policy (Gilens, ; Hacker and Pierson, ; Page, Seawright, and Lacombe, ; Schlozman, Verba, and Brady, ). This can contribute to a vicious cycle, whereby inequality depresses participation (Solt, , ), further exacerbating socioeconomic biases in political influence and representation (Avery, ; Franko, Kelly, and Witko, ).…”

Section: Conclusion and Political Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Class Attitudes, Political Knowledge, and Support for Redistribution in an Era of Inequality

Macdonald

2020

Social Science Quarterly

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Objective Why, despite positive feelings toward the poor and working classes, relative to the rich and big business, has American public support for redistribution failed to appreciably increase during an era of high, and rising, income inequality? Methods I argue that this puzzling disconnect is due, in part, to a lack of general political knowledge. Using survey data from the 2012 American National Election Study, I test how political knowledge conditions the relationship between people's economic class group attitudes and their support for redistribution. Results People with low (high) levels of political knowledge weakly (strongly) connect their class attitudes with support for redistributive spending and progressive taxation. Data from four ANES panel studies show that this does not result from the less knowledgeable holding weak “nonattitudes” toward these class groups. Rather, consistent with Converse's classic work, I attribute this to less knowledgeable individuals lacking awareness about how redistributive policies benefit different social groups. Conclusion These findings help us to better understand an important puzzle in American politics: why a mass public that purports to favor the poor and working classes over the economic elite has not turned more strongly in favor of redistribution during an era of historic inequality.

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Section: Conclusion and Political Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Class Attitudes, Political Knowledge, and Support for Redistribution in an Era of Inequality

Macdonald

2020

Social Science Quarterly

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“…Policies governing the donative organizations used by elites provide an extra civic boost by allowing them to exercise power over public policy without public scrutiny or constraint (Goss, ). Indeed, Page, Seawright and Lacombe () argue that billionaires pursue influence through “stealth politics,” meaning they remain publicly quiet on policy issues while channeling large sums of money to favored candidates and causes (see also Mayer, ).…”

Section: Affecting Political Visibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Bringing Organizations Back In: Multilevel Feedback Effects on Individual Civic Inclusion

Goss¹,

Barnes²,

Rose³

2019

Policy Studies Journal

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Policy feedback scholarship has focused on how laws and their implementation affect either organizations (e.g., their resources, priorities, political opportunities, or incentive structures) or individuals (e.g., their civic skills and resources or their psychological orientations toward the state). However, in practice the distinction between organizations and individuals is not clear‐cut: Organizations interpret policy for individuals, and individuals experience policy through organizations. Thus, scholars have argued for a multi‐level model of feedback effects illuminating how policies operating at the organizational level reverberate at the individual level. In this theory‐building article, we push this insight by examining how public policy influences nonprofit organizations’ role in the civic life of beneficiaries. We identify five roles that nonprofit organizations play. For each role, we draw on existing research to identify policy mechanisms that either enlarge or diminish nonprofits’ capacity to facilitate individual incorporation and engagement. From these examples, we derive cross‐cutting hypotheses concerning how different categories of citizens may need policy to operate differently to enhance their civic influence; whether policy that is “delivered” through nonprofits may dampen citizens’ relationship with the state; and how the civic boost provided by policy may be influenced by the degree of latitude conferred on recipient organizations.

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“…Second, the results may improve correlation with -but not definitively address -the likely lodestar variable affecting policy outcomes, which is the transfer of large amounts of money to policy makers from the wealthiest sources focused intensely on particular policies. For example, the biggest corporations who can influence in their own right or members of the billionaire class throwing around their financial weight in the political sphere (Page et al, 2018;Meyer, 2017;Ferguson, 1995).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Predicting United States Policy Outcomes with Random Forests

McGuire

Delahunt

2020

INET Working Paper Series

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Two decades of U.S. government legislative outcomes, as well as the policy preferences of high-income people, the general population, and diverse interest groups, were captured in a detailed dataset curated and analyzed by Gilens, Page et al. (2014). They found that the preferences of high-income earners correlated strongly with policy outcomes, while the preferences of the general population did not, except via a linkage with the preferences of high earners. Their analysis applied the tools of classical statistical inference, in particular logistic regression. In this paper we analyze the Gilens dataset using the complementary tools of Random Forest classifiers (RFs), from Machine Learning. We present two primary findings, concerning respectively prediction and inference: (i) Holdout test sets can be predicted with approximately 70% balanced accuracy by models that consult only the preferences of those in the 90th income percentile and a small number of powerful interest groups, as well as policy area labels. These results include retrodiction, where models trained on pre-1997 cases predicted “future” (post-1997) cases. The 20% gain in accuracy over baseline (chance), in this detailed but noisy dataset, indicates the high importance of a few distinct players in U.S. policy outcomes, and aligns with a body of research indicating that the U.S. government has significant plutocratic tendencies. (ii) The feature selection methods of RF models identify especially salient subsets of interest groups (economic players). These can be used to further investigate the dynamics of governmental policy making, and also offer an example of the potential value of RF feature selection methods for inference on datasets such as this one.

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Billionaires and Stealth Politics

Cited by 54 publications

References 0 publications

Class Attitudes, Political Knowledge, and Support for Redistribution in an Era of Inequality

Class Attitudes, Political Knowledge, and Support for Redistribution in an Era of Inequality

Bringing Organizations Back In: Multilevel Feedback Effects on Individual Civic Inclusion

Predicting United States Policy Outcomes with Random Forests

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