Elites Flashcards
1
Q
Elites
Hersh (2022)
Definition of ‘Economic Elites’
Who are economic elites?
A
- Senior executives at major firms within a political unit of interest, such as a city, state, or the United States.
- A broader economic class (i.e., the top 1% of wealthy individuals within a city, state, or the nation) of which the business leaders are part and with which they share class interests.
2
Q
Elites
Lukes
Argument
Do economic elites have more influence than others
A
Three faces of power:
- Face One: Decision making. A has power over B to the extent that he can get B to do something that B would not otherwise do.
- Face Two: Agenda Setting. “A had power over B when she is able to set the agenda for a decision-making process.”
- Face Three: Preference Shaping. “A may exercise power over B by influencing him into believing something against their interests
3
Q
Elites
Hacker and Pierson (2010)
Argument
Do economic elites have more influence than others
A
The US has a “winner-takes-all economy” in which there is a hyper-concentration of rewards at the top of the economic hierarchy, which they claim is a result of the political system.
4
Q
Elites
Gilens and Page (2014)
Theories they test
Do economic elites have more influence than others
A
- The theory of economic-elite domination is that policy making is dominated by those who have substantial economic resources such as ownership of business firms; this is opposed to the theoretical tradition of majoritarian electoral democracy, which attributes policies chiefly to the collective will of average citizens, empowered by democratic elections
- They also test two different theories of pluralism: majoritarian pluralism, which argues that the interests of citizens are mostly equally represented, and biased pluralism, in which corporations, business associations, and professional groups predominate
5
Q
Elites
Gilens and Page (2014)
Data/Methodology
Do economic elites have more influence than others
A
- They gather data on a large, diverse set of policy cases, using 1779 instances between 1981 and 2002 in which a national survey of the general public asked a favour/oppose question regarding a proposed policy change and assessing responses by income level.
- They use policy preferences at the fiftieth income percentile as a measure of the preferences of the average citizen and preferences of those at the ninetieth income percentile as a proxy for the opinion of wealthy and high-income Americans.
- To measure the preferences and actions of interest groups, Gilens developed a measure of Net Interest Group Alignment using the groups on the “Power 25” lists (which Baumgartner previously found to be substantially correlated with the full interest-group index) and adding ten key industries that had reported the highest lobbying expenditures and coding each group as favourable and not favourable to a policy change
- The dependent variable is a measure of whether the policy change proposed in each question was adopted within four years of it being asked.
- To distinguish between majoritarian pluralism and biased pluralism, they compute separate net-interest-group alignment indices for business-orientated and for mass-based groups
6
Q
Elites
Gilens and Page (2014)
Findings
Do economic elites have more influence than others
A
- When all three independent variables are included in a multivariate model and are tested against each other, Gilens and Page find that the impact of average citizen’s preferences drops to a non-significant level, whereas economic elites and organised interest groups are estimated to have a substantial, significant, independent influence on policy
- Whilst the coefficients for both types of interest groups are positive and statistically significant, the coefficients for business groups is almost twice as big as that for the mass-based groups, further suggesting that economic elites (who are more likely to own powerful businesses and share the interests of business orientated groups) have influence over policy making in the US.
7
Q
Elites
Gilens and Page (2014)
Possible Methodological Issues
Do economic elites have more influence than others
A
- Their proxy measures have limitations; for example, the preferences of those at the ninetieth income percentile is an imperfect proxy for the opinions of economic elite, as those at this income level are not extremely rich or elite
However:
- There is evidence that the preferences of the top two percent of income earners are much more highly correlated with the top ten percent of earners than the preferences of the average survey respondent
- the imperfection of the measure is likely to underestimate the impact of economic elites on policy making
8
Q
Elites
Bashir (2015)
Argument
Do economic elites have more influence than others
A
- The evidence for average citizens being ignored by the policy making process is much weaker than suggested by Gilens and Page, as their test underestimates the impact of citizens at the fiftieth percentile
- Gilens and Page’s study does not follow the standard practice of dealing with dichotomous variables, which is to employ logistic regression to avoid violation of the constant error variance assumption of linear regression, and instead relies on linear regression of a dichotomous dependent variable on two highly correlated independent variables
- The high correlation of the independent variables of preferences of the 50th percentile and 90th percentile violates an assumption of both linear and logistic regression. When conditioned on policy outcome, the preference distributions are difficult to distinguish from eachother; if one group is far more influential on policy, one might expect distributions to diverge when condition on this, but this does not occur
9
Q
Elites
Bashir (2015)
Data/Methodology
Do economic elites have more influence than others
A
Bashir uses a simulation to investigate whether Gilens and Pages’ linear regression of a dichotomous dependent variable on highly correlated independent variables can generate extreme but incorrect results
10
Q
Elites
Bashir (2015)
Findings
Do economic elites have more influence than others
A
- There is not enough evidence, as Gilens and Page claim there is, to demonstrate that average citizens have very little impact on policy outcomes, and that Gilens and Page’s analysis underestimates the causal-impact of median-income preferences.
- However, Bashir stresses that the wealthiest Americans and business do still enjoy advantages over average citizens in influencing the policy process
11
Q
Elites
Persson and Sundell (2023)
Argument
Do economic elites have more influence than others
A
- income-related differences in congruence and responsiveness were present in most of the countries we studied. However, these differences are not easily explained by the factors most commonly cited in the literature, such as levels of economic inequality, campaign finance regulations, union density, or voter turnout.
- The US is hardly unique in terms of outcomes. This suggests that the explanations for unequal responsiveness are more general than initially thought and that the responsiveness literature has searched for explanations in the wrong places.
12
Q
Elites
Persson and Sundell (2023)
Data/Methodology
Do economic elites have more influence than others
A
- They analyze survey data on the policy preferences of about 3,000 policy proposals from thirty European countries over nearly forty years, combined with information on whether each policy proposal was implemented or not.
- The main independent variables are the level of support in different income groups, while the dependent variables measure whether policy proposals were implemented at different points in time.
- They also test four explanations commonly found in the literature: whether unequal responsiveness is exacerbated by (a) high economic inequality, (b) the absence of campaign finance regulations, (c) low union density, and (d) low voter turnout.
- Used congruence as a measure: Congruence measure is if a policy change was adopted, the extent of congruence for any given subgroup is measured by the proportion of that subgroup that favored the policy change, regardless of whether it is more or less than half; if policy remained unchanged, the extent of congruence is simply the proportion that opposed the policy change.
13
Q
Elites
Persson and Sundell (2023)
Findings
Do economic elites have more influence than others
A
- The average congruence among low-income citizens is 53.7 per cent, for middle-income citizens it is 55.1 per cent, and that of high-income citizens is 57.1 per cent. Thus, there is an income-based congruence difference of more than 3 percentage points – policy changes are more congruent with the preferences of high-income citizens than with the preferences of low-income citizens.
- The differences are more considerable between countries than the income-related differences within countries
- In most countries, the difference in congruence between low-income citizens and high-income citizens is between 2 and 5 percentage points. Thus, while countries differ in their absolute levels of congruence, the difference between low- and high-income citizens is relatively similar in many countries
- There is no significant relationship between the difference in congruence between the income groups and economic inequality, strict campaign finance regulations, voter turnout level, or union density
14
Q
Elites
Kalla and Broockman (2016)
Argument
Do economic elites gain influence through donations?
A
- Through making donations, economic elites can influence policy makers to support policy that is in their interest.
- This is because money can buy expensive advertising which increases legislators’ chance of re-election, and policy makers may view contributions as markers of shared ideology and expertise.
- There is also reason to think that legislators may give special treatment to those who have donated to other campaigns; legislators may think that there is potential the donor will donate to them, and may want to discourage donors from donating to their opponent again by maintaining support from them
- Much research on this topic shares the short-coming of failing to account for endogeneity, as interest groups may choose to contribute to politicians who they believe share their preferences, or have found null observational results which mask causal effects of contributors giving money to legislators whose support is in doubt and not to legislators whose support is ensured
- Other studies do not deal with the methodological issues presented by the fact that legislators may react to observing that an individual has donated to other legislators
15
Q
Elites
Kalla and Broockman (2016)
Data/Methodology
Do economic elites gain influence through donations?
A
- Randomly assigning whether legislators were made aware that a political organisation’s members had contributed and compared the level of access its members obtained when this information was and was not revealed.
- Their experiment, which was embedded in a political organisation’s effort to build support for a bill before Congress to ban a chemical, had an access-seeking organisation attempt to arrange meetings between high-level congressional officials and members living in their districts who had previously given to political campaigns, and randomly assigned whether congressional officials were aware the prospective meeting attendees were campaign donors
- The outcome variable was whether the meeting was granted and the seniority of the official who attended the meeting.
