US Politics: Interview - "The Majority Does Not Rule In US Democracy" - by Benjamin I. Page

Your study “Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” is set to appear in the fall issue of Perspectives on Politics and has already been acclaimed as “historically important”. The study shows that the preferences of average Americans have little to no impact on the formulation of public policy. How do you arrive at this conclusion?

Marty Gilens and several assistants spent ten years assembling a unique data set on 1,779 cases of U.S. policy making. They gathered comprehensive information on each case including preferences of the average American and affluent Americans, along with the line-up of how many business or mass based interest groups took positions (pro or con). We then used regression analysis to analyze policy outcomes. 

This seems like a good way to estimate influence, but of course there was nothing easy about measuring the presence or absence of policy change for each of the 1,779 different cases. Gilens and his team spent hours poring over news accounts, government data, Congressional Quarterly publications, academic papers and the like.

By studying these policy cases, we found that even overwhelmingly large pro-change majorities of up to 80 percent in the population managed to effect policy changes in only about 43 percent of the cases. Narrow pro-change majorities of the public got the policy changes they wanted even only in about 30 percent of the cases. 

The data shows that average citizens and mass-based interest groups actually have little or no independent influence on policies. This is troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate that the majority does not rule – at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.

Those who rule the US are \mostly affluent Americans, corporations, and business oriented interest groups. 

Our research shows that economic elites and groups that represent business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy. These results provide substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism. In contrast, it seems that theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism fail to adequately describe the process of U.S. policy formulation today.

Read more: Benjamin I. Page: The Majority Does Not Rule In US Democracy