Unequal and unrepresented : political inequality and the people’s voice in the new Gilded Age PDF
Preview Unequal and unrepresented : political inequality and the people’s voice in the new Gilded Age
Unequal and Unrepresented Political Inequality and the People’s Voice in the New Gilded Age Kay Lehman Schlozman Henry E. Brady Sidney Verba PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire 0X20 1TR press.princeton.edu Jacket design by Faceout Studio All Rights Reserved ISBN 978-0-691-18055-7 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017958942 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Adobe Text Pro and Gotham Printed on acid-free paper, oo Printed in the United States of America 10 987654321 To Stanley, Patty, and Cynthia, ourfirst and onlys, with whom we have shared nearly a century and a half of marriage Because half a dozen grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring... whilst thousands of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, pray do not imagine that those who make the noise are the only inhabitants of the field. -EDMUND BURKE REFLECTIONS ON THE REVOLUTION IN FRANCE, 1790 People often say that, in a democracy, decisions are made by a majority of the people. Of course, that is not true. Decisions are made by a majority of those who make themselves heard and who vote—a very different thing. -REP. WALTER H. JUDD ( R-MIN N ESOTA) Donald Trump’s candidacy inspired millions of Americans to join his quest to give a voice to those who have long felt silenced. -RNC STATEMENT "ON TONIGHT’S HISTORIC ELECTION VICTORIES” https://www.gop.com/topic/elections-hillary-clinton /NOVEMBER 9, 2016 That’s what our democracy demands. It needs you. Not just when there’s an election, not just when your own narrow interest is at stake, but over the full span of a lifetime. If you’re tired of arguing with strangers on the Internet, try talking with one of them in real life. If something needs fixing, then lace up your shoes and do some organizing. If you’re disappointed by your elected officials, grab a clipboard, get some signatures, and run for office yourself. Show up. Dive in. Sthy at it. -PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA FAREWELL ADDRESS. JANUARY 10, 2017 CONTENTS Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii 1 Introduction 1 PART I 2 What Do We Mean by Political Voice? Does Equal Voice Matter? 23 3 The Roots of Citizen Participation: The Civic Voluntarism Model 50 PART II 4 Who Exercises Political Voice? 83 5 The Noisy and the Silent: Divergent Preferences and Needs 94 6 Do Digital Technologies Make a Difference? 112 7 Social Movements and Ordinary Recruitment 129 PART III 8 Who Sings in the Heavenly Chorus? The Shape of the Organized Interest System (with Philip E. Jones) 147 9 Representing Interests through Organizational Activity (with Philip E. Jones) 169 viii CONTENTS Tl PART IV e t 10 Growing Economic Inequality and Its (Partially) Political Roots 187 t u 11 Has It Always Been This Way? 206 v 12 Can We Do Anything about It? 227 r i 13 Unequal Voice in an Unequal Age 255 i i Notes 279 Index 319 ] 1 PREFACE In the winter of 2015, one of us took a road trip on the California coast that included a visit to the immense, opulent Hearst Castle in San Simeon. When the obvious question arose, “Is this the biggest house in the United States?” curiosity led to a Wikipedia page titled “List of largest houses in the United States.” Turns out that, according to Wikipedia, the Hearst Castle is not the largest house in the United States. At 175,000 square feet, that would be Bilt more House in Asheville, North Carolina, constructed during the 1890s in the “Chateauesque” style for George Washington Vanderbilt II. The Hearst Castle is not even in the top ten. As social scientists, we could not help noticing a curious pattern in the listing in the Wikipedia article. Of the 110 houses on the list, more than three-quarters were finished during one of two relatively brief periods, 1891 through 1920 and 1991 through the present, eras that together account for less than one quarter of the years since 1776, when the first of the listed houses was completed. In contrast, only 6 percent of the mansions date from the six decades between the onset of the Great Depression and the end of the Reagan Administration.1 The recent construction of so many mega-dwellings lends concreteness to what economists have noted for some time. We live in a New Gilded Age, in which incomes for those at the top of the ladder have skyrocketed, while incomes for those in the middle class and below have languished. The result is greatly enhanced economic inequality. This increased concentration of income and wealth—at levels not seen since the late 1920s—has been accom panied by a heightened capacity of the affluent and well educated to pass along their advantages to their offspring and growing inequalities in many domains of life, for example, widening class-based gaps in health outcomes and life expectancy, not to mention house sizes. For more than thirty years, the three of us have considered a different aspect of inequality: political inequality—in particular, inequalities of po litical voice. We have explored whose voices are heard in American politics ix X PREFACE through the activity of individuals and organizations that seek to influence political outcomes—either directly through expressions aimed at shaping policy or indirectly through efforts to affect the results of elections. Over and over, we have demonstrated that some people have a megaphone while others speak in a whisper. Disparities in political voice have been a feature of the American political landscape for at least as long as we have had in struments to measure them, and they are not simply random but reflect un derlying patterns of advantage based on income and, especially, education. This book seeks to present in a brief, user-friendly format what we have learned. Old friends will note that we have drawn directly on two earlier works. The first, Voice and Equality2 (a.k.a. “the big blue doorstop”), pro vided an explanation of how the preferences and interests of all citizens come to be represented unequally. We used a series of statistical analyses to show how differences in participatory resources such as time, money, and skills; in psychological orientations to politics such as political interest, informa tion, and efficacy; and in being recruited to political activity help explain why some people get involved in politics and others remain quiescent. A subsidiary theme was the consequences of this explanatory model for the shape of political voice: how representative are those who do speak? The second, The Unheavenly Chorus3 (a.k.a. “the big red doorstop”) picked up the theme of whose voices are heard and extended the analy sis of inequalities in political voice in several directions. We investigated inequalities of political voice that result not only from the participation of individuals but also from the multiple activities of the organizations involved in politics; the extent to which inequalities of political voice persist over decades; the possibility that political participation on the Internet might act as trip wire in breaking the patterns we had found; and the potential for reforms, ranging from procedural tinkering to broader social changes, to ameliorate the inequalities of political voice associated with inequalities in education and income. In this volume, not only have we distilled two substantial books into a relatively short one, but we have also taken the opportunity to reflect and update. We have thrown into sharper relief the core themes of a larger body of work and considered the problem of unequal political voice in a changed environment shaped by increasing economic inequality and new rules of the political game. In the process, we cut away interesting but less essential material. Although there is no way to answer the questions we pose without engaging in systematic data analysis, we have tried to do the reader a favor by dispensing with complex statistical models and long explanations of our PREFACE xi methods. As scholars, we have provided notes to aid the curious and the skeptical, but, in a departure from prior practice, we have relegated them to the back of the book. Even though many of the fundamental concepts have been developed over a long history of scholarly inquiry and will thus be familiar to readers of Voice and Equality or The Unheavenly Chorus, much of the empirical mate rial is new. We used more recent data wherever possible and even collected a new round of data about organized interests. The result is that more than three-quarters of the data in the tables and figures have been updated. Per haps more importantly, we also take account of new scholarship and ongo ing political developments. Since we published The Unheavenly Chorus, the consequences of the federal court decisions defining political contributions as a form of protected speech have become clearer. Furthermore, the Su preme Court subsequently decided Shelby v. Holder (2013), which declared unconstitutional the “preclearance” provisions of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, and the many state-level changes to voting procedures had either not yet been legislated or not yet implemented. More recently, the insurgent candidacies of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in 2016 tapped into the deep well of anger and fear among middle- and working-class voters who, responding to the political and economic inequalities we analyze in these pages, feel that the system is rigged against them. Those who felt the Bern emphasize progressive economic policies, such as breaking up big banks, raising the minimum wage, and taxing the very rich. Trump followers have a less economic and more nationalist focus and emphasize limiting immigration and confronting the threat of terrorism. Still, they agree with one another about the dangers of increasing inequality and the pernicious impact of money in our politics. Yet these strong issue concerns have not translated into political action for these groups in the past, and perhaps not even in the future. As students of political participation, we were not surprised by the finding in a January 2016 American National Election Studies Pilot Survey that supporters of these two candidates were less likely to have voted in 2012 than the supporters of all other primary candidates. All these aspects of the environment for the exercise of polit ical voice have given even greater urgency to our intellectual concerns. It certainly seems like the right time to revisit our work on political inequality in America. We hope that we have provided new readers a congenial format for en countering our sometimes discouraging findings and old friends with an updated refresher course in unequal political voice in America. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS As always, we have incurred many debts in the course of completing this book. We continue to be very grateful to our home institutions—Boston College, the University of California-Berkeley, and Harvard University— for supplying us not only with critical research resources but also with congenial long-term homes in which to function as teachers and scholars. In particular, we thank Shirley Gee and Karina Ovalles of Boston College and Sarah Baughn and Bri Cuozzo of the University of California-Berkeley for having helped us in so many ways. One of the rewards of academic life is working with the students, both un dergraduate and graduate, who become part of the research family. Sonja Petek served as a fantastic analyst and manager of data. A superb team that included Brendan Buci, Erica Cross, Tanner Edwards, Laura Fedorko, Therese Murphy, and Greta Weissner coded and cleaned the 2011 data for the Washington Rep resentatives Study. We also thank Alex Barton, Anne Bigler, Andrew Bowen, Daniel Geary, Sam Hayes, Marissa Marandola, and Jacob Wolfe for their cre ativity and perseverance in undertaking many and varied research tasks. Over the many years that we have been studying inequality of political voice, it has been a joy to work with graduate students who become peers as co-authors and dear friends. We are deeply indebted to Traci Burch, Nancy Burns, Jennifer Erkulwater, Philip E. Jones, and Shauna Shames, who were co-authors of chapters of The Unheavenly Chorus, and to Hye Young You, who was a co-author of two of the later papers on which we drew for this book. We are also beholden to Casey Klofstad, who celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Voice and Equality by assembling a set of papers that use diverse methods and approaches to push the boundaries of what we know about political participation. We express our appreciation to Lee Rainey of the Pew Internet and American Life Project for supporting a second round of data collection in 2012 so that we could continue to assess the ramifications of the rapidly changing digital environment for inequalities of political voice. We also xiii
The list of books you might like
