Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans

Abstract

It is important to know what wealthy Americans seek from politics and how (if at all) their policy preferences differ from those of other citizens. There can be little doubt that the wealthy exert more political influence than the less affluent do. If they tend to get their way in some areas of public policy, and if they have policy preferences that differ significantly from those of most Americans, the results could be troubling for democratic policy making. Recent evidence indicates that “affluent” Americans in the top fifth of the income distribution are socially more liberal but economically more conservative than others. But until now there has been little systematic evidence about the truly wealthy, such as the top 1 percent. We report the results of a pilot study of the political views and activities of the top 1 percent or so of US wealth-holders. We find that they are extremely active politically and that they are much more conservative than the American public as a whole with respect to important policies concerning taxation, economic regulation, and especially social welfare programs. Variation within this wealthy group suggests that the top one-tenth of 1 percent of wealth-holders (people with $40 million or more in net worth) may tend to hold still more conservative views that are even more distinct from those of the general public. We suggest that these distinctive policy preferences may help account for why certain public policies in the United States appear to deviate from what the majority of US citizens wants the government to do. If this is so, it raises serious issues for democratic theory.

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

“…Using the 179 CCES respondents who reported at least $250,000 (roughly the top 4.5 percent of the income distribution), the corresponding correlations are .97 and .76. Some corroborating evidence comes from a comparison of the Survey of Economically Successful Americans (Page, Bartels, and Seawright 2013), based on a local sample of the wealthiest 1 percent or 2 percent of Americans, and the Inequality Survey (Page and Jacobs 2009), which was based on a representative sample of the American public. Eight policy-preference questions that were included on both surveys showed that the preferences of the top 25 percent of income earners generally fell about half way between those of the average citizen and those of the wealthy.…”

Government for the People? – Unequal Responsiveness of the Bundestag

“…Vermögen in Umfragen oft unterrepräsentiert, was tendenziell zu einer Unterschätzung bestehender Einstellungsunterschiede führt. Um die Präferenzen der obersten Einkommensgruppen näher zu untersuchen, führen Page et al (2013) (Gilens 2015a, S. 226). Die Möglichkeit der direkten politischen Einflussnahme der "Superreichen" scheint deshalb vielen amerikanischen Autor_innen die naheliegendste Erklärung ungleicher Responsivität.…”

The general problem of prioritization

“…In reality, politics and policy-making is heavily in uenced by special interest groups: Concerted e orts by relatively small but wealthy groups heavily shape policy in democratic systems, and the goals and preferences of special interest groups are usually di erent from the goals and preferences of the general population [15,16,17,18].…”