Larry M. Bartels - Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age

T HIS BOOK REPORTS the results of a six-year exploration of the political causes and consequences of economic inequality in America. It is inspired, in significant part, by a major change in American society over the past three decadesthe substantial escalation of economic inequality that I refer to as the New Gilded Age. That economic transformation has attracted considerable attention from economists but much less attention from political scientists. It seemed to me, as a student of American politics, that careful attention to public opinion, partisan politics, and public policy might shed valuable new light on how and why the economic fortunes of affluent, middle-class, and poor people have diverged so dramatically in the contemporary United States.

As a student of democracy, it also seemed important to me to explore the ramifications of escalating economic inequality for the American political system. Probably most sentient observers of American politics suspect that the concentration of vast additional wealth in the hands of affluent people has augmented their influence in the political arena, while the stagnating economic fortunes of middle-class and poor people have diminished their influence. However, systematic measurement of political influence is at a very rudimentary stage, leaving political scientists remarkably ill-equipped to confirm, refute, or qualify that suspicion. I have attempted here, through a combination of systematic statistical analysis and case studies, to assess the extent to which economic inequality in contemporary America gets translated into political inequality.

Some readers are likely to see the product of my efforts as a rather partisan book, at least by academic standards. For what it is worth, I can report that it did not start out that way. I began the project as an unusually a political political scientist. (The last time I voted was in 1984, and that was for Ronald Reagan.) While I was prepared to find that parties and partisanship play an important role in the politics of economic inequality, as they do in many domains of American politics, I was quite surprised to discover how often and how profoundly partisan differences in ideologies and values have shaped key policy decisions and economic outcomes. I have done my best to follow my evidence where it led me.

In telling this story I have attempted to balance the demands of scholarship and accessibility. My aim has been to make the text and figures comprehensible to general readersat least to general readers who have some patience for the twists and turns of serious arguments and systematic evidence. Tables and notes provide additional scholarly detail, some of which will only be intelligible or interesting to people with some background in social science or statistics or both. I recognize that any compromise of this sort is bound to leave readers in both camps less than fully satisfied; however, I view it as a necessary accommodation to the prevalence of social-scientific illiteracy among Americans who read (and write) about politics and public affairs.

I suspect that the prevalence of social-scientific illiteracy in American public discourse is both a cause and an effect of the fact that social-scientific research is woefully undersupported in American society. However, I have been unusually fortunate in finding generous financial, institutional, and personal support for my work, and it is a great plea sure to acknowledge that support here.

Princeton University and its Woodrow Wilson School have provided time and facilities for research, as well as regular access to stimulating students and colleagues. I am grateful to the past and present deans of the Woodrow Wilson School, Michael Rothschild and Anne-Marie Slaughter, for building and maintaining a vibrant intellectual community in which to pursue serious analysis of significant public issues. I am also grateful to students in my Wilson School seminar on In equality and American Democracy for serving as an invaluable test-audience for the first complete draft of the book, and to my colleagues Roland Benabou, Angus Deaton, Alan Krueger, Jonathan Parker, and Mark Watson for providing generous advice about economic issues and literature.

Within the Woodrow Wilson School, my primary home for the past eight years has been the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. The faculty, visitors, students, and staff there have provided abundant intellectual and moral support, including appropriate mixtures of criticism and encouragement in response to half-baked arguments presented in lunch seminars, conferences, and common room chats. I am especially grateful to Doug Arnold, Brandice Canes-Wrone, Michele Epstein, Marty Gilens, Dave Lewis, Nolan McCarty, and Markus Prior for helpful reactions and suggestions. As I have come to expect over the years, Chris Achen provided especially cogent advice and especially generous encouragement. He also graciously tolerated the constraints imposed by this project on the progress of our long-running collaborative work on democratic accountability. Next!

I have also benefited greatly, and repeatedly, from the generous support of the Russell Sage Foundation and its president, Eric Wanner. The first stages of my research were conducted as part of the Princeton Working Group on In equality, one of several interdisciplinary research teams supported by the Russell Sage Foundation through its Social Dimensions of Inequality project. I thank Bruce Western, the ringleader of the Princeton Working Group, for involving me in the project, and Bruce, Paul DiMaggio, Leslie McCall, Nolan McCarty, and Howard Rosenthal for providing a supportive collaborative setting in which to tackle issues well outside the range of my previous scholarly expertise. Annual meetings of the various Russell Sage Foundation working groups at Harvard (2001), Wisconsin (2002), Mary land (2003), Princeton (2004), Berkeley (2005), and UCLA (2007) served as a floating boot camp introducing me to many of the toughest issues and much of the best current research in the field.

The Russell Sage Foundation provided a separate grant to support the collection of new survey data on inequality and public policy as part of the 2002 National Election Study (NES). Those data figure prominently in chapters 5, 6, and 7 of this bookand in related work by many other scholars. It was a plea sure to collaborate with Nancy Burns and Don Kinder, the principal investigators of the 2002 NES, in designing the inequality module. I am grateful to them and to their colleagues at NES for implementing the survey and sharing the data. More generally, I am indebted to the long succession of principal investigators, staff, and overseers who have contributed to the invaluable accumulation and dissemination of NES data over more than half a century. Much of the analysis presented here would not have been possible without their efforts.