Testing Theories Of American Politics - We Failed

As a former university professor, I have a tendency to place more weight in academic journals than other outlets. Granted, academics often have an agenda, and can be as guilty of cherry-picking data as better known commentators. However, they are kept in check, or at least somewhat restrained, by the peer review process. I'm not claiming academic journals are infallible or 100% bias-free, but I will argue that in general they are more objective than other sources.

Which is why I read this paper with mixed emotions. On the one hand, it confirms what I've felt for quite a while now. On the other hand, it paints a very depressing portrait of our country's political structure.

Who governs? Who really rules? To what extent is the broad body of U.S. citizens sovereign, semi-sovereign, or largely powerless? These questions have animated much important work in the study of American politics.

While this body of research is rich and variegated, it can loosely be divided into four families of theories ... Each of these perspectives makes different predictions about the independent influence upon U.S. policy making of four sets of actors: the Average Citizen..., Economic Elites..., Mass-based Interest Groups, or Business-oriented Interest Groups...

What differentiates this study from previous ones is the authors' use of an advanced statistical technique known as multivariate analysis "to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model." The paper used a large data set that measured key variables for 1,779 different policy issues. (Multivariate Analysis is a set of powerful statistical techniques for analyzing large amounts of data with many variables to identify patterns and relationships among multiple variables.)

Before your eyes glaze completely over, I'll cut to the bottom line. In what should not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention, the authors conclude:

"our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts... America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened... the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy ... Economic Elite Domination theories do rather well in our analysis...”

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. The United States of America is not a democracy, or even a democratic republic. Rather, we have become an oligarchy - "a form of power structure in which power effectively rests with a small number of people."

The implication:

What the authors are able to find ... is important: the first-ever scientific analysis of whether the U.S. is a democracy, or is instead an oligarchy, or some combination of the two. The clear finding is that the U.S. is an oligarchy, no democratic country, at all. American democracy is a sham, no matter how much it’s pumped by the oligarchs who run the country (and who control the nation’s “news” media). The U.S., in other words, is basically similar to Russia or most other dubious “electoral” “democratic” countries. We weren’t formerly, but we clearly are now.

R.I.P., U.S.A.