That’s Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America, by my friend and former colleague Martin Gilens, published this week by Princeton University Press and the Russell Sage Foundation.
The current issue of Boston Review features a terrific symposium on the book, with Gilens’s nice summary of the argument and reactions from Russ Feingold, John Ferejohn, Archon Fung, Michael Gecan, Nancy Rosenblum, Kay Schlozman, Mark Schmitt, Barbara Sinclar, Matthew Yglesias, and me.
Of course, there is a great deal still to be learned about the role of economic power in the political process. But Gilens’s years of careful empirical research and his impressively fair and clear presentation of the evidence mark a major step forward in the scientific study of political inequality in America.
P.S. How many decades? Well, I’m a big fan of John Gaventa’s Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley (1980). But if Gaventa is not your cup of tea, there is always Robert Dahl’s Who Governs? Democracy and Power in an American City (1961).
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Gaventa forever! The book is a fixture in my senior seminar course when the students pick democracy as the topic. (Which, I might add, they do most of the time.) What would be nice is if someone could convince Gaventa or one of his students to go back to Clear Creek and update the book. I’m betting that not much has changed fundamentally.
And why did you not like “Winner-Take-All Politics” which covered the topic before it got popular?
I’m a big fan of _Winner-Take-All Politics_, a book that had a lot to do with making the topic “popular.” However, I think of it primarily as a study of the political forces contributing to escalating economic inequality at the top of the income distribution, not as a study of the broad ramifications of political inequality per se; in any case, it is certainly less systematic in its analysis of disparities in political influence than Gilens’s book is. (And, for what it’s worth, Gilens was in on the ground floor of the boom in inequality studies, too, as evidenced by his influential 2005 article on “Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness” in _Public Opinion Quarterly_, which foreshadowed some of the central findings in his book.)