On "Unequal Democracy" by Larry Bartels

I recently read Larry Bartels' book Unequal Democracy.

The book begins by presenting a case that the economic policies of Republican presidents are harmful to most Americans and the policies of Democratic presidents are beneficial to most Americans.  Then, he explores why this hasn't led to more Democratic electoral victories.  He considers when in the election cycle voters need to see benefits, why voters support tax cuts that mostly benefit the rich / repeal of the estate tax, why the minimum wage hasn't kept up with inflation despite wide public support, etc.  Because he argues Democratic policies are better for most people, partisan reactions to the book are likely.

While I think GOP policies have been worse for working people than Democratic policies, my impression has been that Democratic policies haven't been as good as he suggests.  The Wikipedia item on Pres. Carter's policies describes him as a fiscal conservative, says his first economic proposal centered on tax cuts, and it says "he was more concerned with avoiding inflation and balancing the budget than addressing unemployment."  In response to inflation, "Carter enacted an austerity program by executive order," and a recession followed.  Wikipedia also tells us Carter deregulated the airline and beer industries.  (These Carter policies preceded "the Reagan revolution.")  Wikipedia says Pres. Clinton's "approach entailed modernization of the federal government, making it more enterprise-friendly while dispensing greater authority to state and local governments."  It says his policies included "fiscal discipline," cutting the deficit, free trade agreements, increasing taxes on 1/4 of Social Security beneficiaries, increasing the gas tax, taxes were cut on small businesses and capital gains, gave more state control over welfare programs and made public assistance harder to get, and deregulated banking.  Not all of Clinton's policies were of this type, but there were many such moves.  Bartels' book was published before Obama was elected.

I think this shows that after the early 1970's, Democratic policies are neither what they had been from FDR to Johnson nor are they so diametrically different from GOP policies. 

The author presents some economic statistics to support his view.  I'm not an economist and can't present stronger counter-statistics, so I'll present questions the book raises, alternate sources, and speculations.  Some of his statements do seem to beg questions.  He attributes policy effects to a party solely based on who is president, which is sometimes questionable.  Some of his statistics seemed to refer to total economy rather than the living standards of low to middle income people; some did appear to focus on low / middle incomes.  In trying to show this was not a purely partisan book, Bartels states he had voted for Reagan, which might reflect a different view on what's good for low / middle income people.  If nothing else, the book only covers events up to about 2007, and says little about the shifting Democratic policies which began with Pres. Carter.

The book compares statistics under Democratic and Republican presidents from about 1950 to 2006.  This is Bartels' chosen framework, so if Carter and Clinton don't fit, that is his framework failing.  He treats 1950-2006 as a single historical period.  But in the last several decades, we're seen more Democrats who are "fiscal conservatives," free trade advocates, and who subsidize big business (as NY Democrats recently did for Amazon)...  It's important to look at Bartels' data to try to make sense of what he thinks is a relatively consistent pattern of benefits while Democratic policies changed.

This may be partly explained by inadequate government statistics.  Working people's living standards aren't only determined by wages and consumer prices.  There are changes to employer-provided benefits, increased deductions for those benefits, shifts to regressive taxes / user fees, shorter product lifespans, use of cheaper materials, etc. 

My impression is the difference in Democratic vs. Republican policies is the rate at which things get tougher.  Even if, in the short-term, Democratic policies have allowed prices to grow slower than wages by using free trade to bring cheap imports; in the long-term, that means declining wages as countries compete to provide cheap labor and globalization is used to reduce unions.  Our children's living standards will be lower.

I discussed having to look carefully at economic statistics used in the media in blog .

Important analysis on what motivates the two parties is in Martin Gilens' Affluence and Influence from Princeton University Press.  It is not as much a politician's personal ideology as Bartels seems to think.  Rather, maintaining the loyalty of interest groups the politician depends on for campaign funds and volunteers plays a big role in their votes on legislation.  And Gilens found that in recent decades, when 80% of Americans supported a social welfare policy, but a majority of the top 10% opposed it, it was implemented less than 1/3 of the time.  The rate would vary some depending on the party in power, but this is the general situation.  Gilens also found when voters were asked what characteristics connected them to Democrats, only 32% mentioned policies or philosophy, while 56% mentioned it for Republicans.  So, most Americans don't see dependable policy from Democrats. Blog on Affluence and Influence

Consistent with this view of less-ideological Democrats, Bartels finds the policy preferences of the least affluent 1/3 of Americans has no discernible influence on Democrats' actions - and Bartels finds lower voter turnout can't explain total lack of influence.  Whatever ideology Democrats may have does not prevent total indifference to the opinions of low-income people, yet being influenced by high-income people.

Bartels wants to know why Democrats aren't winning more if they're better for most people.  He argues that voting is affected on economic benefits received during a presidential election year, not on long-term bendfits.  He says benefits from Democratic policies show up most in a president's second year, but voters have often seen benefits in a Republican's re-election year.  That suggests Democratic policies often give a one-time benefit, not an annual cost-of-living increase.  (In a chapter on the minimum wage, he notes that benefits such as Social Security have COLA's, but Democrats have never implemented one for the minimum wage.  Such could provide yearly boosts to income.)  Is Bartels saying people vote out Democrats if their living standard is unchanged in an election year, or only when factors have lowered their real income?  If the latter, why don't Democrats act on that?  Also, if Democratic policies show benefits in a president's second year (midterm campaign year), why don't Democrats win those midterms?

Bartels discusses the voting tendencies of whites with and without college degrees, and whether they act in their own economic interests.  Some readers will find this of interest.  Bartels doesn't explore much into what they might perceive as their economic interests.  Although a white man may have racial or male biases, if he felt more secure in his job / income, he may be less inclined to vote against equal opportunities for women and minorities.  Bartels tells us that the percentage of low and middle income whites who vote for Democrats didn't change significantly from 1950 to 2004.  Yet, he also attributes the decline in Democratic seats in Congress since the 1960s to Southerners switching to the Republican party in recent decades - a period in which Southern African-Americans became more Democratic and gained voting rights.

He believes there are 3 major factors that have contributed to more votes for Republicans.  (1) Republican administrations are more likely to give economic benefits in election years.  (2) Election year income gains go mostly to upper income people.  (3) Higher campaign spending.

Bartels assumes Democrats have simply never realized that their job security depends on voters seeing their living standard improve during re-election years.  I'd suggest, the real reason may be that wealthy donors also tend to forget that 2 years ago the president did something they didn't like (i.e. raised poor people's incomes,) but they don't give money if you help poor people during the re-election campaign.

Bartels also argues that low / middle income people are more influenced by economic benefits for the affluent than those for themselves.  It sounds odd, but, perhaps, because so much publicity is given to economic statistics about stocks, corporate profits, GDP, productivity and such that many people feel hopeful that all the good news for the rich will help them, too.

Bartels depicts Americans as having a mixed view of inequality.  He says Americans don't object as a matter of principle to inequality as much as people in other countries do.  At the same time, Americans tend to say the rich pay to little in taxes and hold the rich in less esteem.  And then, many Americans support tax cuts which mostly benefit the rich.  However, those who are better informed are more likely to oppose those tax cuts.  (He doesn't make a general rule that people who are generally uninformed are more likely to favor policies that mostly help the rich, but he doesn't say why it happens with taxes.)

Chapter 6 is on tax cuts.  He says that polls before the Bush tax cuts showed both that people thought they would mostly help the rich and that people supported them.  (Other polls showed people would have preferred other budget changes rather than the tax cuts.)  I've wondered how much of public support for tax cuts can be explained by people who have little hope of pay raises feel that their best hope is a small tax cut which is included with big tax cuts for the rich.

Bartels mentions a poll in which among the respondents who were found to be most knowledgeable about the tax cut bill, 64% said the Democrats opposed it.  If more than 1/3 of the most knowledgeable didn't see the Democrats opposing a tax cut which is mostly for the rich, it may suggest the Democrats' opposition was not so clear.

He discusses how the inflation-adjusted minimum wage declined since the late 1960's despite strong public support for raising it.  Bartels states, "When Republicans control the White House, minimum wage increases are rare regardless of which party controls Congress..."  However, Department of Labor data says: While Nixon was president the minimum wage had increments in 3 years based on a law passed before he took office and 1 other year.  Then, 3 years while Ford was president, 2 years under George H. W. Bush and 2 years under George W. Bush.  His statement seems untrue and biased.  Bartels has structured the book's analysis around using the president as the determinant of which party to attribute positive or negative results, but if these minimum wage raises are based on Democratic Congresses, that premise seems flawed.

As noted above, Bartels says that some government payments, such as Social Security benefits, are automatically adjusted for inflation, but the minimum wage never has one.

Chapter 9 is on the connection between income groups and political influence.  Gilens' Affluence and Influence covers this more extensively (and also includes some more recent data.)

Bartels finds that the opinions of people in the poorest 1/3 of Americans had no noticeable effect on Senate roll-call votes.  This seems especially noteworthy.  Sometimes a politician knows his constituents want him to vote "yes," but the politician would tend to vote "no."  If the politician knows the majority of the legislature will vote "no," he may cast a "yes" vote to gain favor with constituents.  Otherwise, the politician will vote "no," as the rich prefer.  So, some of these roll-call votes were just for show - and still, there's not even an illusion of caring for poor people's opinions.

The middle 1/3 income group did have some influence on Senate votes, but not as much as the upper income group.  Bartels wrote, "In the case of the civil rights and budget waiver votes, the statistical results presented in table 9.3 imply that the effect of a senator’s own party affiliation would be entirely neutralized by a shift in the views of his affluent constituents from one extreme to the other of the observed distribution of ideological opinion. For the minimum wage vote an even smaller shift in opinion among high-income constituents — say, from the average opinion in California to the average opinion in West Virginia — would have been sufficient to counteract the effect of senators’ own partisan loyalties."  The wishes of the more affluent aren't the only factor in Democrats' voting, but (at least for some polices) it is the most significant factor.  Of course, Democrats and Republicans tend to respond to pressure from different sectors of the wealthy.

Bartels asks why the affluent have so much more influence.  He finds that large enough numbers of poor people vote that voter turnout can't explain total indifference to their opinions.  (Keep in mind, if only insignificant numbers of poor people voted, it wouldn't be "necessary" for states to put so much effort into voter suppression against the poor.)  Bartels found that even after taking into account the combined effects of voter knowledge, turnout and contacting officials, the difference in responsiveness to rich and poor is only reduced by about 1/3.  Bartels says he didn't have data to definitively say so, but it seemed that campaign money was the decisive factor.

Bartels concludes that the poor have no basis to vote for Democrats in the sense that Democrats care about the opinions of the poor.  But he argues that the rich and middle income people who do influence Democrats favor policies that are better for the poor than Republican policies are.

In Chapter 10, he discusses the economic realm controlling the political arena.

He present the view democracy can't really be the public ruling, only that the public can decide who rules.  Perhaps, it's impractical to have all government policies discussed and approved by the entire population.  However, there are policies or policy directions which can be discussed and decided by ballot propositions.  But, currently, there seems to be no such thing as ballot propositions for federal legislation, and restrictions on ballot propositions in states which allow them.  (In cases where it is considered impractical to have voters determine the exact wording of a law, the public could be allowed to vote on the goals or basic characteristics of what they wanted.  Then if elected officials wrote legislation inconsistent with that, a court case might be used to decide if majority will had been ignored.)

Bartels suggests that having the two parties fairly evenly matched makes compromise more necessary - one party is less able to ignore public opinion.  I would object that compromises can be pure "horse trading" - "I'll give you X that the public doesn't want, if you give me Z that the public doen't want."  Otherwise, compromises involve finding things where the parties aren't so far apart.  And the thing the parties have most in common is being influenced by the most affluent.  If Bartels was proposing a method to force compromises between the preferences of middle income people and upper income people, that would not be fully democratic, but it would be better than compromises between rich group A and rich group B.

Bartels says that large labor unions have played an important role in pushing policies favorable to low and middle income people - although declining union power has reduced this influence.  I would suggest that in the era around the 1930's that large Socialist and Communist parties also played an important role.  Those parties had clear, strong positions for working people.  If Democrats leaned too far the other way, they could lose votes and loyalties.

I'm less inclined to ask, "What is less bad?"  I prefer to ask what we want and how to get it.  Certainly, having my living standard decreased by 1% is less bad than having it fall by 2%.  But there's only so many times you can do that.  You have to find a third option.  If government economic policy grew the economy by 3%, but wages only grew by 1%, you might be better off, but should you be satisfied?  Even if we could wave a magic wand and make the rich use their influence to enact policies they genuinely believed would benefit the common good, would you really want to depend on them knowing what was best for us?

Other books:

Affluence and Influence by Martin Gilens
   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/14891864-affluence-and-influence
Seven Bad Ideas by Jeff Madrick
   https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20447627-seven-bad-ideas

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Affluence and Influence - the book, etc.

Free Market economics and Madrick's "Seven Bad Ideas"