Kay Lehman Schlozman - The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy

THE UNHEAVENLY CHORUS

Unequal Political Voice and
the Broken Promise
of American Democracy

KAY LEHMAN SCHLOZMAN
SIDNEY VERBA
HENRY E. BRADY

Princeton University Press
Princeton and Oxford

Copyright 2012 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press,

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In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schlozman, Kay Lehman, 1946

The unheavenly chorus : unequal political voice and the broken promise of

American democracy / Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, Henry E. Brady.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-691-15484-8 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Political participationUnited States. 2. EqualityUnited States.

3. Pressure groupsUnited States. 4. DemocracyUnited States. I. Verba, Sidney. II. Brady, Henry E. III. Title.

JK1764.S365 2012

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Minion Pro with Quadraat

display by Princeton Editorial Associates Inc., Scottsdale, Arizona

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To our many students, then and now

with whom we feel a deep connection;

to whom we hope we have given a richer understanding

of democratic equality;

from whom we know we have learned.

The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.

E. E. Schattschneider, The Semisovereign People

No government is legitimate if it does not show equal concern for the fate of those citizens over whom it claims dominion.

Ronald Dworkin, Sovereign Virtue:

The Theory and Practice of Equality

When you are in the legislature, it can be hard to distinguish the loud from the many.

Maggie Wood Hassan, former state senator, New Hampshire

If youre not at the table, youre on the menu.

Washington adage

What are you complaining about? Its a level playing field.

Charles Barsotti / The New Yorker Collection / www.cartoonbank.com.

Just as we were in the late stages of finishing a draft of the manuscript for this volume, the satirical newspaper, The Onion, announced that the American people had hired Jack Weldon, a heavy-hitting Washington lobbyist from Patton Boggs, to help to represent their concerns before Congress:

Known among Beltway insiders for his ability to sway public policy on behalf of massive corporations such as Johnson & Johnson, Monsanto, and AT&T, Weldon, 53, is expected to use his vast network of political connections to give his new client a voice in the legislative process.

Weldon is reportedly charging the American people $795 an hour.

Unlike R. J. Reynolds, Pfizer, or Bank of America, the U.S. populace lacks the access to public officials required to further its legislative goals, a statement from the nation read in part. Jack Weldon gives us that access.

His daily presence in the Capitol will ensure the American people finally get a seat at the table, the statement continued. And it will allow him to advance our message that everyone, including Americans, deserves to be represented in Washington....

The 310-million-member group said it will rely on Weldons considerable clout to ensure its concerns are taken into account when Congress addresses issues such as education, immigration, national security, health care, transportation, the economy, affordable college tuition, infrastructure, jobs, equal rights, taxes, Social Security, the environment, housing, the national debt, agriculture, energy, alternative

The deeply troubling issue underlying this humorous spoofa concern about whether ordinary Americans have a voice in the politics of their democracyis the same one that brought us to write this book. For some time, economists have been using systematic data to demonstrate convincingly the extent of the inequalities of income and wealth in the United Statesmost recently in an authoritative study by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. We have undertaken a parallel project for the political arena: to use systematic evidence of several kinds to measure and analyze inequalities of political voice or, to echo our title, to listen carefully to the chorus of American political activists to determine whether it sings with an upper-class accent.

In September 2011, some months after this unsettling satire appeared, we were putting the final touches on the manuscript when concern about inequalitywhich, despite increasing attention and debate among elites, had gained little political traction within the publicwas suddenly dramatized by populist protest on the left. The unstructured and leaderless Occupy movement spread quickly from Wall Street not just to San Francisco and Seattle but to Omaha, Dallas, Miami, and Cheyenne. Although its objectives seem somewhat inchoate, a dominant theme in its anticorporate, egalitarian rhetoric is the gap between rich and poor. However, a subsidiary goal, achieving political voice for the politically silent, is expressed in hand-lettered signs with the following messages: You have the right to remain silent, but I wouldnt recommend it. I cant afford a lobbyist. I am in the 99%. I am so angry, I made a sign. At this point, we cannot predict whether the Occupy protest will be sustained after the first blizzard of 2011, much less whether it will have a political impact. Still, like the Tea Partyin many respects its counterpart on the opposite side of the political spectrumOccupy Wall Street demonstrates the frustrations of ordinary people who think that nobody in a position of power is listening.

A decade and a half ago, the three of us published a hefty tome on the subject of inequalities in political activity.Voice and Equality described the extent to which the preferences and interests of citizens are represented unequally through the political activity of individuals and analyzed the origins of participatory inequalities. The core of Voice and Equality was a series of statistical analyses explaining why some people get involved in politics and others remain quiescent. A subsidiary theme was to delineate the consequences of what we had found for political voice: that is, to explore the implications for the cacophony of political expression from citizens of the way that the process of political participation works and to assess the extent to which political input is representative of the citizenry as a whole.

Why, one might ask, have we now written another book on inequalities of political voice? In publishing Voice and Equality, we exhausted ourselvesand probably our readersbut not the subject, one we found endlessly fascinating and considered to be critical to democratic governance in the United States. We recognized that, while we had written a lot, we had not said our last word.

Jointly and severally, we continued to work on aspects of citizen participation, eventually deciding that