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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

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 12y 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.
- noobhacker 12y ago
  This passage talks about what policies are included, not how the respondents are recruited / how their answers are recorded.
  - twoodfin 12y ago
    These were all presumably publicly available national polls, conducted by a variety of organizations using a variety of methods. Unfortunately, the origins of this data set are with Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America by Martin Gilens (one of the authors of this paper), and thus it's difficult to learn more about them without having the book on hand. I'd be interested to know if they only used non-partisan polls from national polling organizations (e.g. Gallup), as opposed to polls conducted under the auspices of an interest group.
    - noobhacker 12y ago
      Thanks for the info. On the one hand I feel (emphasis on feel) like the conclusion is correct. But on the other hand, as a Political Scientist I have to treat this as a scientific endeavour and criticize its method regardless of its conclusion. And as a scientific work, this piece ranks lowly I think. There is very little theory, i.e. okay, even if the rich gets more influence, exactly why is that true? If it's because of campaign contribution law, we can test that thanks to change in campaign law. Plus, the people can always vote their representatives out of Congress -- why don't they? Is it because of a lack of transparency on their representatives' stand? Is it because campaign ads are so effective? Or even because that people don't really care enough? Anyhow, this paper may (or may not) report an intriguing empirical regularity. But what to make of it is not at all very clear.
      - Zigurd 12y ago
        > But what to make of it is not at all very clear. One possibility is that the fairy tale of representative government is wrong, and that, because of both structural problems and money politics, we don't live in a representative system that deserves deference from the people. We're living on the rentiers' plantation. If that's true, inevitably the field servants will wonder "Why not burn it down?"
sremani 12y ago
The dissonance between Washington and Main St is very visible even for the unfocused of the observers. I have problem with your second point, which seems to be coming out of "fox news" playbook. Rich people are likely motivated - I do not know how a person sorting the labels in Walmart at 3 am in the morning (certainly not in my book) is not "motivated" and the fact that most Rich are "sperm lottery" winners (unlike the self-made businessman myth right tries to pedal), but its the other way round the impediments for rich motivated person are few compared to impediments for poor motivated person. The poor motivated person makes a placard and goes to his congressman, where the rich motivated person donates the max the congressman and would get 30 minutes of Congressman's time during fund raising or some other "social" event.
- dang 12y ago
  > The dissonance between Washington and Main St Without disagreeing with your comment, may I gently suggest (to all HNers) that ideologically charged catch-phrases are best avoided here. As we all know, this kind of thread is sensitive to getting derailed—or perhaps one should say railed, onto predictable, predefined tracks that go straight to the shouting matches. Those are exciting, but low-quality agitation. On HN we want light, not heat, and experience shows you can't have both—not on the internet anyway. Because our brains are all programmed to react reflexively to these phrases—whether positively or negatively doesn't matter—I think we should strive to edit them out of our comments. The signal/noise ratio will be higher for it, and the risk of sparking a flamewar lower.
  - sremani 12y ago
    I agree with you. I understand that the post has to be substantial and devoid of "reflexive phrases". At the risk of getting down-voted, growing up (not in the US) I used to watch construction workers - a woman with a toddler few feet from construction working from early morning 5a.m. to 9p.m. People living in squalor making clothes and dyes and giving it all while doing it. So for the narrative of "rich people are more motivated than poor" is repugnant and would not let that statement go unchallenged. I have no light to shine - I live under the sun along with the light, I will take the heat.

twoodfin 12y 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.

noobhacker 12y ago
This passage talks about what policies are included, not how the respondents are recruited / how their answers are recorded.
- twoodfin 12y ago
  These were all presumably publicly available national polls, conducted by a variety of organizations using a variety of methods. Unfortunately, the origins of this data set are with Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America by Martin Gilens (one of the authors of this paper), and thus it's difficult to learn more about them without having the book on hand. I'd be interested to know if they only used non-partisan polls from national polling organizations (e.g. Gallup), as opposed to polls conducted under the auspices of an interest group.
  - noobhacker 12y ago
    Thanks for the info. On the one hand I feel (emphasis on feel) like the conclusion is correct. But on the other hand, as a Political Scientist I have to treat this as a scientific endeavour and criticize its method regardless of its conclusion. And as a scientific work, this piece ranks lowly I think. There is very little theory, i.e. okay, even if the rich gets more influence, exactly why is that true? If it's because of campaign contribution law, we can test that thanks to change in campaign law. Plus, the people can always vote their representatives out of Congress -- why don't they? Is it because of a lack of transparency on their representatives' stand? Is it because campaign ads are so effective? Or even because that people don't really care enough? Anyhow, this paper may (or may not) report an intriguing empirical regularity. But what to make of it is not at all very clear.
    - Zigurd 12y ago
      > But what to make of it is not at all very clear. One possibility is that the fairy tale of representative government is wrong, and that, because of both structural problems and money politics, we don't live in a representative system that deserves deference from the people. We're living on the rentiers' plantation. If that's true, inevitably the field servants will wonder "Why not burn it down?"

sremani 12y ago

The dissonance between Washington and Main St is very visible even for the unfocused of the observers. I have problem with your second point, which seems to be coming out of "fox news" playbook. Rich people are likely motivated - I do not know how a person sorting the labels in Walmart at 3 am in the morning (certainly not in my book) is not "motivated" and the fact that most Rich are "sperm lottery" winners (unlike the self-made businessman myth right tries to pedal), but its the other way round the impediments for rich motivated person are few compared to impediments for poor motivated person. The poor motivated person makes a placard and goes to his congressman, where the rich motivated person donates the max the congressman and would get 30 minutes of Congressman's time during fund raising or some other "social" event.

dang 12y ago
> The dissonance between Washington and Main St Without disagreeing with your comment, may I gently suggest (to all HNers) that ideologically charged catch-phrases are best avoided here. As we all know, this kind of thread is sensitive to getting derailed—or perhaps one should say railed, onto predictable, predefined tracks that go straight to the shouting matches. Those are exciting, but low-quality agitation. On HN we want light, not heat, and experience shows you can't have both—not on the internet anyway. Because our brains are all programmed to react reflexively to these phrases—whether positively or negatively doesn't matter—I think we should strive to edit them out of our comments. The signal/noise ratio will be higher for it, and the risk of sparking a flamewar lower.
- sremani 12y ago
  I agree with you. I understand that the post has to be substantial and devoid of "reflexive phrases". At the risk of getting down-voted, growing up (not in the US) I used to watch construction workers - a woman with a toddler few feet from construction working from early morning 5a.m. to 9p.m. People living in squalor making clothes and dyes and giving it all while doing it. So for the narrative of "rich people are more motivated than poor" is repugnant and would not let that statement go unchallenged. I have no light to shine - I live under the sun along with the light, I will take the heat.