5 ms·

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, Citizens [pdf]

46 points by vixen99 13y ago

Pinatubo 13y ago
I think it's deliberately misleading to say the study is "from Princeton and Northwestern Universities," when it's a coauthored article by one professor from each place. I think that was done to make the study sound more important, probably because the author of the news article agrees with the premise of the study.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Pinatubo 13y ago
  And based on the downvotes, it appears that many people here also agree with the premise of the study! Seriously, publications are by professors, not universities. It's at best lazy and inaccurate reporting to say otherwise.
dang 13y ago
Since the study may be interesting, I changed the url from [1] to the paper itself. All: This is one of those subjects that is fine for HN if the discussion remains substantive and civil, and otherwise deserves to be flagged. If you comment in this thread, please make sure your comment is substantive and on-topic. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10769041/The-US-is-an-oligarchy-study-concludes.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...
twoodfin 13y ago
The linked document is missing its figures and tables, which makes it a little hard to get at the nuts and bolts of the analysis. I don't know if a more complete version is publicly available yet. They appear to conclude that "economic elites" get their policy preferences enacted more often than the median voter (though there's a good deal of inertia that makes change difficult no matter which groups want it). That's not surprising to me in a republican system: Elites are the ones getting elected! This is not necessarily a bug if you think voters are better as judges of character, values and capability than as issue-by-issue decision makers. The authors disagree, though I think they describe the other side of the argument uncharitably: A possible objection to populistic democracy is that average citizens are inattentive to politics and ignorant about public policy; why should we worry if their poorly informed preferences do not influence policy making? Perhaps economic elites and interest group leaders enjoy greater policy expertise than the average citizen does. Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and perhaps they seek the common good, rather than selfish ends, when deciding which policies to support. But we tend to doubt it. We believe instead that – collectively – ordinary citizens generally know their own values and interests pretty well, and that their expressed policy preferences are worthy of respect.
- anigbrowl 13y ago
  No it isn't. They start on page 25, although the I would certainly appreciate a link to the source data.
  - twoodfin 13y ago
    Ahh... thanks! Yeah, I'd be most interested in seeing the extremes: Which are the policy changes with 80%+ support from non-"elite" income Americans that top-10%-ers did not approve and were not enacted? And vice-versa: Which very unpopular ideas have become law with only support from the elite? They list some of these in parentheticals, but links to some individual surveys would be more useful.
    - anigbrowl 13y ago
      Agreed. It's not definitive but it's a great jumping-off point. I plan to track down the book mentioned in the paper as having a lot of the source data, I too would have liked more in-depth analysis.
      - twoodfin 13y ago
        I am unfamiliar with how this stuff is supposed to work in the social sciences, but it's a little disturbing that Gilens seems to be mining this curated "database" of polls for several years of high profile publications instead of releasing it publicly. Maybe it's in an appendix to the book...
noobhacker 13y ago
Alright, this paper got 3000 upvotes on reddit and I thus failed to make a dent to the hivemind. I will try here once more. I have two criticisms of this paper: 1) I did not find any details regarding how they construct the population's preference on policy. (I'm glad if someone can educate me.) I highly doubted that they can poll a significant amount and a representative sample of people on nearly 2000 issues spanning the 80s-now. Even if they can, think about the survey fatigue that these people suffer. 2) They do not control for anything besides wealth. What if wealthy people are just smart / motivated -- and motivated people get involved more and have more influence on policy. I'm not advocating any hypothesis of my own here and simply criticizing the scientific validity of the authors. Finally, as a insider of Political Science, I would recommend that everyone takes any study with a huge grain of salt. (I recognize that that claim is unsupported by this comment, but just an observation).
- twoodfin 13y ago
  From page 10: What makes possible an empirical effort of this sort is the existence of a unique data set, compiled over many years by one of us (Gilens) for a different but related purpose: for estimating the influence upon public policy of “affluent” citizens, poor citizens, and those in the middle of the income distribution. Gilens and a small army of research assistants gathered data on a large, diverse set of policy cases: 1,779 instances between 1981 and 2002 in which a national survey of the general public asked a favor/oppose question about a proposed policy change. A total of 1,923 cases met four criteria: dichotomous pro/con responses, specificity about policy, relevance to federal government decisions, and categorical rather than conditional phrasing. Of those 1,923 original cases, 1,779 cases also met the criteria of providing income breakdowns for respondents, not involving a Constitutional amendment or a Supreme Court ruling (which might entail a quite different policy making process), and involving a clear, as opposed to partial or ambiguous, actual presence or absence of policy change. These 1,779 cases do not constitute a sample from the universe of all possible policy alternatives (this is hardly conceivable), but we see them as particularly relevant to assessing the public’s influence on policy. The included policies are not restricted to the narrow Washington “policy agenda.” At the same time – since they were seen as worth asking poll questions about – they tend to concern matters of relatively high salience, about which it is plausible that average citizens may have real opinions and may exert some political influence.
tokenadult 13y ago
As I browsed through the paper, it occurred to me that readers here on Hacker News may want to know more about public choice theory, a theoretical perspective that suggests some reasons why representative democracy will not work as ideally as hoped in any country. (The founders of the United States, writing about two centuries before public choice theory was studied under that name, were actually quite hard-headed about such issues, as you can see by reading The Federalist, the book including essays mostly by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton about why the federal Constitution should be ratified, although imperfect, in the 1780s.) Some links that I like for introductions to public choice theory (something I studied in a law school class on legislation in the 1980s) include these that I've Google up a few times before. http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21569692-james-buchanan-who-died-january-9th-illuminated-political-decision-making http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21569692... http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/pdf%20links/Booklet.pdf http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/pdf%20links/Booklet.... http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Public_choice_theory.html https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Public... As usual, the Winston Churchill quotation gets it right: "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Has public choice theory ever been put to the test empirically?
  - noobhacker 13y ago
    Ah ha! You just identified the great debate in Political Science. It's very hard to empirically test game theoretical models since a lot of the model components are about the utility of the actors which is very hard to get at empirically. Plus, things like repeated game have multiple equilibria and we don't really know why the equilibrium that is our world gets to happen.
rrggrr 13y ago
Except this: The lawyer's lobby (gives the most) largely advocates for laws that let them monetize human suffering to the benefit of humans suffering at the hands of corporations; The retired lobby (gives 2nd most) largely advocates positions that reduce medical expenses and margins for healthcare firms. On the opposite side is insurance and business lobbies opposing the lawyers, and healthcare lobbies opposing retirees positions. The notion that an oligarchy controls American disconnected from citizens interests, and free from competing interests is hyperbole that makes for cool titles. Intensely competing interests = democracy.

46 points by vixen99 13y ago

I think it's deliberately misleading to say the study is "from Princeton and Northwestern Universities," when it's a coauthored article by one professor from each place. I think that was done to make the study sound more important, probably because the author of the news article agrees with the premise of the study.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Pinatubo 13y ago
And based on the downvotes, it appears that many people here also agree with the premise of the study! Seriously, publications are by professors, not universities. It's at best lazy and inaccurate reporting to say otherwise.

dang 13y ago

Since the study may be interesting, I changed the url from [1] to the paper itself. All: This is one of those subjects that is fine for HN if the discussion remains substantive and civil, and otherwise deserves to be flagged. If you comment in this thread, please make sure your comment is substantive and on-topic. [1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10769041/The-US-is-an-oligarchy-study-concludes.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...

twoodfin 13y ago

The linked document is missing its figures and tables, which makes it a little hard to get at the nuts and bolts of the analysis. I don't know if a more complete version is publicly available yet. They appear to conclude that "economic elites" get their policy preferences enacted more often than the median voter (though there's a good deal of inertia that makes change difficult no matter which groups want it). That's not surprising to me in a republican system: Elites are the ones getting elected! This is not necessarily a bug if you think voters are better as judges of character, values and capability than as issue-by-issue decision makers. The authors disagree, though I think they describe the other side of the argument uncharitably: A possible objection to populistic democracy is that average citizens are inattentive to politics and ignorant about public policy; why should we worry if their poorly informed preferences do not influence policy making? Perhaps economic elites and interest group leaders enjoy greater policy expertise than the average citizen does. Perhaps they know better which policies will benefit everyone, and perhaps they seek the common good, rather than selfish ends, when deciding which policies to support. But we tend to doubt it. We believe instead that – collectively – ordinary citizens generally know their own values and interests pretty well, and that their expressed policy preferences are worthy of respect.

anigbrowl 13y ago
No it isn't. They start on page 25, although the I would certainly appreciate a link to the source data.
- twoodfin 13y ago
  Ahh... thanks! Yeah, I'd be most interested in seeing the extremes: Which are the policy changes with 80%+ support from non-"elite" income Americans that top-10%-ers did not approve and were not enacted? And vice-versa: Which very unpopular ideas have become law with only support from the elite? They list some of these in parentheticals, but links to some individual surveys would be more useful.
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    Agreed. It's not definitive but it's a great jumping-off point. I plan to track down the book mentioned in the paper as having a lot of the source data, I too would have liked more in-depth analysis.
    - twoodfin 13y ago
      I am unfamiliar with how this stuff is supposed to work in the social sciences, but it's a little disturbing that Gilens seems to be mining this curated "database" of polls for several years of high profile publications instead of releasing it publicly. Maybe it's in an appendix to the book...

noobhacker 13y ago

Alright, this paper got 3000 upvotes on reddit and I thus failed to make a dent to the hivemind. I will try here once more. I have two criticisms of this paper: 1) I did not find any details regarding how they construct the population's preference on policy. (I'm glad if someone can educate me.) I highly doubted that they can poll a significant amount and a representative sample of people on nearly 2000 issues spanning the 80s-now. Even if they can, think about the survey fatigue that these people suffer. 2) They do not control for anything besides wealth. What if wealthy people are just smart / motivated -- and motivated people get involved more and have more influence on policy. I'm not advocating any hypothesis of my own here and simply criticizing the scientific validity of the authors. Finally, as a insider of Political Science, I would recommend that everyone takes any study with a huge grain of salt. (I recognize that that claim is unsupported by this comment, but just an observation).

twoodfin 13y ago
From page 10: What makes possible an empirical effort of this sort is the existence of a unique data set, compiled over many years by one of us (Gilens) for a different but related purpose: for estimating the influence upon public policy of “affluent” citizens, poor citizens, and those in the middle of the income distribution. Gilens and a small army of research assistants gathered data on a large, diverse set of policy cases: 1,779 instances between 1981 and 2002 in which a national survey of the general public asked a favor/oppose question about a proposed policy change. A total of 1,923 cases met four criteria: dichotomous pro/con responses, specificity about policy, relevance to federal government decisions, and categorical rather than conditional phrasing. Of those 1,923 original cases, 1,779 cases also met the criteria of providing income breakdowns for respondents, not involving a Constitutional amendment or a Supreme Court ruling (which might entail a quite different policy making process), and involving a clear, as opposed to partial or ambiguous, actual presence or absence of policy change. These 1,779 cases do not constitute a sample from the universe of all possible policy alternatives (this is hardly conceivable), but we see them as particularly relevant to assessing the public’s influence on policy. The included policies are not restricted to the narrow Washington “policy agenda.” At the same time – since they were seen as worth asking poll questions about – they tend to concern matters of relatively high salience, about which it is plausible that average citizens may have real opinions and may exert some political influence.

tokenadult 13y ago

As I browsed through the paper, it occurred to me that readers here on Hacker News may want to know more about public choice theory, a theoretical perspective that suggests some reasons why representative democracy will not work as ideally as hoped in any country. (The founders of the United States, writing about two centuries before public choice theory was studied under that name, were actually quite hard-headed about such issues, as you can see by reading The Federalist, the book including essays mostly by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton about why the federal Constitution should be ratified, although imperfect, in the 1780s.) Some links that I like for introductions to public choice theory (something I studied in a law school class on legislation in the 1980s) include these that I've Google up a few times before. http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21569692-james-buchanan-who-died-january-9th-illuminated-political-decision-making http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21569692... http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm http://www.sjsu.edu/faculty/watkins/publicchoice.htm http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/pdf%20links/Booklet.pdf http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/pdf%20links/Booklet.... http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicChoice.html https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Public_choice_theory.html https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Public... As usual, the Winston Churchill quotation gets it right: "Many forms of Government have been tried and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Winston_Churchill

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Has public choice theory ever been put to the test empirically?
- noobhacker 13y ago
  Ah ha! You just identified the great debate in Political Science. It's very hard to empirically test game theoretical models since a lot of the model components are about the utility of the actors which is very hard to get at empirically. Plus, things like repeated game have multiple equilibria and we don't really know why the equilibrium that is our world gets to happen.

rrggrr 13y ago

Except this: The lawyer's lobby (gives the most) largely advocates for laws that let them monetize human suffering to the benefit of humans suffering at the hands of corporations; The retired lobby (gives 2nd most) largely advocates positions that reduce medical expenses and margins for healthcare firms. On the opposite side is insurance and business lobbies opposing the lawyers, and healthcare lobbies opposing retirees positions. The notion that an oligarchy controls American disconnected from citizens interests, and free from competing interests is hyperbole that makes for cool titles. Intensely competing interests = democracy.