I'm delighted to be at TPMCafe and I'm looking forward to this week's discussion of Unequal Democracy. The book focuses on escalating economic inequality in contemporary America and the ways in which partisan politics and public policy have contributed to it. However, my aim in writing it was broader - to use the politics of economic inequality as a starting point for a more general examination of how American democracy really works. Here are some of the things I think I've learned.

1. Ordinary citizens' policy preferences are often only loosely connected to their beliefs and values. For example, upward of 85% of Americans agree that "our society should do whatever is necessary to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed," but support for specific policies that would promote equal opportunity is much more modest. One problem is that many people are too inattentive to grasp connections between values and policies. Among people with strongly egalitarian values, those who were highly informed about politics opposed the highly inegalitarian Bush tax cuts by a four- to-one margin, but those who were least informed were more likely to support the tax cuts than to oppose them.

2. Even when public preferences are clear and firmly held, policies contrary to those preferences can persist for a very long time if powerful political elites want them to persist.  For example, the real value of the minimum wage has declined by more than 40% since the late 1960s despite remarkably strong and consistent public support for minimum wage increases. (This outcome has been facilitated by the fact that the nominal minimum wage is not adjusted for inflation, but that is itself a political decision; even when Democrats have controlled the White House and Congress, they have preferred symbolic nominal increases to permanent indexing of the sort that has long been accepted for social security.)

3. There are big differences in policies between Democratic and Republican elected officials, even when they represent exactly the same constituents. Political scientists have an elegant theory explaining why this shouldn't happen: if voters choose the candidate closest to their own policy positions, Democrats and Republicans alike must move to the center in order to get elected. The only problem is, they don't. A figure in the book compares the behavior of Democratic and Republican senators representing liberal and conservative states. The difference in behavior between a Democrat and a Republican representing the same constituents turns out to be much greater than the difference in behavior between a Democrat representing the most liberal state in the country and a Democrat representing the most conservative state in the country. Party and ideology dominate constituents' preferences in shaping legislators' roll call votes.

4. Insofar as elected officials are responsive to the policy views of their constituents, only the views of affluent and middle-class people really matter. The preferences of millions of low-income citizens (in the bottom third of the income distribution) have no discernible effect on senators' roll call votes, whether we consider the whole range of issues that come before Congress or specific salient roll call votes focusing on the federal budget, the minimum wage, civil rights, and abortion. Aristotle wrote that "where the possession of political power is due to the possession of economic power or wealth ... that is oligarchy, and when the unpropertied class have power, that is democracy."  By that standard, America is, at best, a very unequal democracy.