Anyone who has been following my posts in the past few days will have surmised that Unequal Democracy is a rather pessimistic book. But I've saved the most pessimistic finding for last. It concerns the ramifications of economic inequality for the workings of our political system. While Americans have a good deal of tolerance for economic inequality, that tolerance is predicated on the "national myth" that we enjoy "full civic equality despite material differences," as Michael Kinsley once put it. Cynics may doubt that "full civic equality" is a reality - but even they should be dismayed by the extent of inequality in the contemporary American political system.

I have measured the responsiveness of U.S. senators to the views of constituents with different incomes - distinguishing people in the bottom, middle, and top thirds of the national income distribution. The results show that senators' roll call votes are moderately strongly related to the views of middle-class constituents, and somewhat more strongly related to the views of affluent constituents. (The relative weight of affluent constituents is noticeably stronger for Republican senators than for Democratic senators.) What is most striking, however, is that there is no evidence of any discernible responsiveness to the preferences of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution. The views of tens of millions of people with nothing in common but their low incomes seem to be utterly ignored by their elected representatives. Insofar as they get what they want with respect to policy, it is only because their views happen to correspond with those of affluent and middle-class people - or, even more importantly, with the partisan and ideological impulses of the senators themselves.

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They certainly sound egalitarian. For example, as I noted the other day, more than 85% of Americans say they agree that "Our society should do whatever is necessary to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed." That sentiment, if taken seriously, implies a quite radical policy agenda with respect to education, health care, and other forms of social support. It also seems very hard to square with tax-free inheritances for the children of multi-millionaires.

Perhaps survey respondents answering very general questions of this sort are simply paying lip service to egalitarian values. However, it is easy enough to find much less abstract expressions of egalitarian sympathies. For example, Americans asked to rate various social groups on a 100-point "feeling thermometer" report warmer feelings toward working class people than toward middle class people, warmer feelings toward poor people than toward rich people, and warmer feelings toward labor unions than toward big business. If these feelings were translated into policies, those policies would be quite egalitarian. But the connection between sympathies and policies is remarkably loose. In some cases - perhaps most strikingly, with respect to the minimum wage - public opinion is strongly and consistently egalitarian, but consistently ignored by policy-makers. (Thus, the real value of the federal minimum wage has eroded by more than 40% over the past 40 years.) More commonly, however, the public's own policy views fail to reflect their egalitarian-sounding impulses.

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Political scientists have shown that the state of the national economy has a substantial impact on voting behavior and election outcomes. Pioneers in this line of scholarship viewed their work as a bracing antidote to pessimistic concerns that the unsophisticated masses would be swayed by slick campaign ads or demagogic appeals. For example, Gerald Kramer characterized his findings as demonstrating "that election outcomes are in substantial party responsive to objective changes occurring under the incumbent party; they are not 'irrational,' or random, or solely the product of past loyalties and habits, or of campaign rhetoric and merchandising." In the same vein, V. O. Key Jr. interpreted retrospective voting as evidence for his "perverse and unorthodox argument" that "voters are not fools."

This optimistic interpretation of economic voting seems to me to be misconceived. While it is certainly true that American voters respond to "objective changes occurring under the incumbent party," they do so in ways that produce an immensely consequential partisan bias in economic accountability. While they may not be fools, they are short-sighted, and their myopia often leads them to cast votes that are damaging to their economic interests.

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One of the most controversial findings in Unequal Democracy is that the incomes of middle-class and working poor families have grown much less robustly under Republican presidents than when Democrats are in the White House. The Census Bureau's Historical Income Tables show that, since 1948, middle-class incomes have grown more than twice as fast under Democrats, while the incomes of working poor families (at the 20th percentile of the income distribution) have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans. Only families near the top of the income distribution have done about equally well under both parties. Skeptics have suggested a variety of reasons to doubt these figures. Here are a few - and the reasons why they are not compelling.

1. The pattern simply reflects the fact that Democrats held the White House for most of the high-growth period before the mid-1970s, while Republicans have mostly been in charge in the more recent slow-growth era. While it is true that income growth has slowed considerably, especially for middle- and low-income families, the partisan differences in income growth appear in both periods considered separately. Allowing for shifts in income growth patterns unrelated to partisan control, oil price shocks, changing levels of labor force participation, and other potentially important economic and social conditions leaves the partisan differences in income growth patterns virtually unchanged.

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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.

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