Princeton Study Uses the ‘O’ Word to Describe American Politics
This won't come as a total shock, but there's some new hard data to back up what we already suspect anecdotally: Our democracy is really an oligarchy.
Frequent presidential candidate and all-around rich guy Mitt Romney, who once referred to the poorest 47 percent of Americans as “takers.” Maria Dryfhout / Shutterstock.com
This won’t come as a total shock, but there’s some new hard data to back up what we already suspect anecdotally: Our democracy is really an oligarchy.
Looking at actual policy and polling, researchers at Princeton concluded that the wealthiest Americans tend to get what they want, or at least they did between 1981 and 2002 (the time frame on which the study focuses).
“The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy,” write Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, “while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence.”
Another quote from the peer-reviewed study: “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it.”
Further reading (and depression) can be found at TPM and the Telegraph.
For the record, the technical definition of an oligarchy is a country or institution controlled by a small group of people.
— Posted by Peter Z. Scheer
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