Why Hasn't Democracy Slowed Rising Inequality?
TLDR
In this article, the authors explore five possible reasons why the US political system has failed to counterbalance rising inequality and suggest that the rich have been able to use their resources to influence electoral, legislative, and regulatory processes through campaign contributions, lobbying, and revolving door employment of politicians and bureaucrats.Abstract:
During the past two generations, democratic forms have coexisted with massive increases in economic inequality in the United States and many other advanced democracies. Moreover, these new inequalities have primarily benefited the top 1 percent and even the top .01 percent. These groups seem sufficiently small that economic inequality could be held in check by political equality in the form of "one person, one vote." In this paper, we explore five possible reasons why the US political system has failed to counterbalance rising inequality. First, both Republicans and many Democrats have experienced an ideological shift toward acceptance of a form of free market capitalism that offers less support for government provision of transfers, lower marginal tax rates for those with high incomes, and deregulation of a number of industries. Second, immigration and low turnout of the poor have combined to make the distribution of voters more weighted to high incomes than is the distribution of households. Third, rising real income and wealth has made a larger fraction of the population less attracted to turning to government for social insurance. Fourth, the rich have been able to use their resources to influence electoral, legislative, and regulatory processes through campaign contributions, lobbying, and revolving door employment of politicians and bureaucrats. Fifth, the political process is distorted by institutions that reduce the accountability of elected officials to the majority and hampered by institutions that combine with political polarization to create policy gridlock.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Skills, education, and the rise of earnings inequality among the “other 99 percent”
TL;DR: The central role of both the supply and demand for skills in shaping inequality is documented, why skill demands have persistently risen in industrialized countries is discussed, and the economic value of inequality is considered alongside its potential social costs.
Journal ArticleDOI
Social media, political polarization, and political disinformation: a review of the scientific literature
Joshua A. Tucker,Andrew M. Guess,Pablo Barberá,Cristian Vaccari,Cristian Vaccari,Alexandra A. Siegel,Alexandra A. Siegel,Sergey Sanovich,Denis Stukal,Brendan Nyhan +9 more
TL;DR: The authors provide an overview of the current state of the literature on the relationship between social media; political polarization; and political "disinformation", a term used to encompass a wide range of types of information about politics found online.
Book
The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century
TL;DR: The "Four Horsemen" of leveling-mass-mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic plagues-have repeatedly destroyed the fortunes of the rich as discussed by the authors.
Journal ArticleDOI
After the “Master Theory”: Downs, Schattschneider, and the Rebirth of Policy-Focused Analysis
Jacob S. Hacker,Paul Pierson +1 more
TL;DR: A growing body of political science research has focused on the role of voters, campaigns, elections, and the ideological distribution of legislators in American politics as discussed by the authors, with a focus on policy and organized groups.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Organizational Reproduction of Inequality
TL;DR: In this article, the authors assess the ways in which organizational practices are impliant of societal inequalities and organizations providing the vast majority of people with their income, with societal inequalities continuing to increase.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
A Rational Theory of the Size of Government
Allan H Meltzer,Scott F. Richard +1 more
TL;DR: In a general equilibrium model of a labor economy, the size of government, measured by the share of income redistributed, is determined by majority rule as mentioned in this paper, where voters rationally anticipate the disincentive effects of taxation on the labor-leisure choices of their fellow citizens and take the effect into account when voting.
Journal ArticleDOI
Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998
Thomas Piketty,Emmanuel Saez +1 more
TL;DR: The authors showed that the large shocks that capital owners experienced during the Great Depression and World War II have had a permanent effect on top capital incomes and argued that steep progressive income and estate taxation may have prevented large fortunes from fully recovering from these shocks.
Book
Congress: A Political-Economic History of Roll Call Voting
Keith T. Poole,Howard Rosenthal +1 more
TL;DR: Poole and Rosenthal as mentioned in this paper used 200 years of congressional roll call voting as a framework for an interpretation of important episodes in American political and economic history, finding that over 80 percent of a legislator's voting decisions can be attributed to a consistent ideological position ranging from ultraconservatism to ultraliberalism.
Book
Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches
TL;DR: McCarty et al. as mentioned in this paper examined the relationship of polarization, wealth disparity, immigration, and other forces, characterizing it as a dance of give and take and back and forth causality.
Book
The Free Press
TL;DR: The Free Press as discussed by the authors is a rationally argued essay explaining the origins of those influences and factors that make the press less than what it should be honest: fair, and independent.