Democracy in America? What has gone wrong and what we can do about it. Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens.
Our government in Washington is so mired in gridlock and inaction that it is unable to provide the obvious solutions desired by most Americans to the many problems that continue to plague them. The authors believe this results from two main causes: clashes between our sharply divided political parties and obstructive actions by corporations, interest groups, and wealthy individuals. They believe these problems can be most effectively addressed by more democracy that gives an equal opportunity for all citizens to shape the policies they need.
The authors define democracy as policy responsiveness to ordinary citizens—that is popular control of government. This commonsense definition reflects the foundational value of political equality in our amended Constitution. Yet this sort of “majoritarian” democracy—which is widely embraced by ordinary citizens—is now increasingly rejected by a number of political theorists and by many social and political elites. Hence, the authors seek to show how democracy has been diminished, why it is necessary, and what remedies and strategies are needed for its restoration.
Most Americans favor the kinds of taxes, regulations, and government spending that support equity and many public goods by countering market failures and externalities. Nevertheless, many of our elected officials disregard this majority support and instead thwart these policies to cater to special interests and the super-rich. Examples of thwarted policies include those for climate change, transportation infrastructure, immigration, gun violence, universal affordable medical care, universal affordable high-quality pre-k through college education, assistance with wages and employment, and progressive taxation for high personal and corporate incomes.
Graphs are provided to document this almost complete lack of influence by average citizens for their policy preferences compared to the influence of interest groups and affluent Americans. These graphs are based on the results of 1,791 proposed policy changes between 1981 and 2002. Unlike average citizens, interest groups and the affluent get most of the policies they want, although not all of them because the system is biased toward inaction.
Not surprisingly, interest groups and affluent Americans have very different policy preferences than ordinary citizens and have considerable success in purchasing what they want by unrestricted enormous spending for campaigns, PACs, and lobbying. Their desired outcomes are focused on high-end tax cuts, minimal government spending, free trade agreements, business subsidies, bank bailouts, and limited regulation for protecting the public interest. Equally as important, they have demonstrated the ability to block policies favored by democratic majorities that they believe are not in their interest, particularly in a system that favors the status quo.
Admirable features of our political system are not sufficient to ensure popular control of government. Many problems contribute to declining democracy, including power from unrestricted spending by wealthy individuals, corporations, and organized interest groups, domination of primaries by extreme activists and polarized parties, restricted electoral choices dictated by activists and donors, manipulated turnout by voter suppression, misinformation in elections, unrepresentative institutions (the Senate and Supreme Court), lobbying by the affluent and well-organized, and gridlock aggravated by procedures like holds and filibusters.
Many reforms are identified as necessary to enable the majority of Americans to get the government they want through the democratic means that should be available to them. Many of these reforms are very predictable, including those for remedying the outsized role of money from super-rich donors and special interests in elections and lobbying, the imbalance of representation in the Electoral College, marked over representation of rural states in the Senate, structure of Congressional and state legislature election districts that favors rural interests and is made worse by Gerrymandering, Supreme Court decisions that greatly favor moneyed interests and fail to protect voting rights, and procedural abuses like filibusters and holds in the Senate and the Hastert Rule in the House.
The path to achieving these reforms to bring about a major increase in government’s responsiveness to average citizens appears to be daunting. The authors state that it can only be attained through a broad, energetic, and persistent social movement: a coalition of millions of people joined together to bring about democratic reforms over the long term. Such powerful egalitarian currents in American political life have periodically triumphed over entrenched interests. This happened in the Jacksonian period, the Progressive Era, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. The authors review the history of these movements and abstract lessons from them that can be applied to today’s struggle.
