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Oligarchy in the United States?

December 2009
Perspectives on Politics 7(04):731 - 751

December 2009
7(04):731 - 751

DOI:10.1017/S1537592709991770

Authors:

Jeffrey A. Winters

Northwestern University

Northwestern University

We explore the possibility that the US political system can usefully be characterized as oligarchic. Using a material-based definition drawn from Aristotle, we argue that oligarchy is not inconsistent with democracy; that oligarchs need not occupy formal office or conspire together or even engage extensively in politics in order to prevail; that great wealth can provide both the resources and the motivation to exert potent political influence. Data on the US distributions of income and wealth are used to construct several Material Power Indices, which suggest that the wealthiest Americans may exert vastly greater political influence than average citizens and that a very small group of the wealthiest (perhaps the top tenth of 1 percent) may have sufficient power to dominate policy in certain key areas. A brief review of the literature suggests possible mechanisms by which such influence could occur, through lobbying, the electoral process, opinion shaping, and the US Constitution itself.

ncome-based material power indices

Wealth-based material power indices

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Oligarchy in the United States?

Jeffrey A. Winters and Benjamin I. Page

We explore the possibility that the US political system can usefully be characterized as oligarchic. Using a material-based deﬁnition

drawn from Aristotle, we argue that oligarchy is not inconsistent with democracy; that oligarchs need not occupy formal ofﬁce or

conspire together or even engage extensively in politics in order to prevail; that great wealth can provide both the resources and the

motivation to exert potent political inﬂuence. Data on the US distributions of income and wealth are used to construct several

Material Power Indices, which suggest that the wealthiest Americans may exert vastly greater political inﬂuence than average citizens

and that a very small group of the wealthiest (perhaps the top tenth of 1 percent) may have sufﬁcient power to dominate policy in

certain key areas. A brief review of the literature suggests possible mechanisms by which such inﬂuence could occur, through lob-

bying, the electoral process, opinion shaping, and the US Constitution itself.

There is widespread agreement that the United States

is a democracy. But is it possible that the US polit-

ical system is also oligarchic? We believe that the

concept of oligarchy can be fruitfully applied not only to

places like Singapore, Colombia, Russia, and Indonesia,

but also to the contemporary United States.

Key to this belief is the fact that oligarchy and democ-

racy are not mutually exclusive but rather can coexist

comfortably—indeed, can be fused integrally—into gov-

ernments that Aristotle conceived to be an “admixture of

the two elements.”

1

Moreover, the existence of oligarchy

need not depend upon oligarchs’ holding formal govern-

ment positions (indirect inﬂuence is sufﬁcient) or upon

explicit coordination or cohesion among oligarchs. It need

not be affected by the circulation of elites. It does not

require extensive political engagement by oligarchs them-

selves. It is not subject to “canceling” effects from plural-

istic struggles in which oligarchs compete with each other

or with other major political forces. Oligarchy can exist

with respect to certain limited but crucial policy issues at

the same time that many other important issues are gov-

erned through pluralistic competition or even populistic

democracy.

One of the present authors, Winters, is completing an

extensive study of oligarchy in various countries. Our

purpose here is not to give a full theoretical or empirical

account of the nature and workings of oligarchy, but

merely to suggest that the concept helps illuminate impor-

tant aspects of the contemporary US case. We believe

that minority power is a fact of life in any complex soci-

ety, with representative government changing the charac-

ter and extent, but not the fact, of majority exclusion.

On this point Robert Michels was right, even if his famous

“iron law” muddles the most important aspects of oligar-

chy by focusing on organizational complexity rather than

power.

2

Contrary to elite theory (and to a range of writ-

ings on oligarchy that are confused versions of elite theory),

we argue that the concept of oligarchy properly refers to

a speciﬁc kind of minority power that is fundamentally

material in character. In the US context, as elsewhere,

the central question is whether and how the wealthiest

citizens deploy unique and concentrated power resources

to defend their unique minority interests. In the United

States (as elsewhere), to the extent that such minority

power is exercised, the political system can be considered

an oligarchy.

Jeffrey A. Winters is associate professor of Political Science,

Northwestern University (winters@northwestern.edu).

Benjamin I. Page is Fulcher professor of Political Science

(b-page@northwestern.edu). For comments and suggestions

we are grateful to Edward Greenberg, Benjamin R. Page,

Bonnie Honig, Kay Lehman Schlozman, EdwardWolff, Tom

Ferguson, Chris Howell, Lawrence Jacobs, Christopher

Jencks, Meredith Jung-en Woo, William Domhoff, Mary

Dietz, Joseph Peschek, James Farr, Eric Rasmusen, Nathan Dap-

eer, Jonathan Pincus, Rizal Ramli, Marc Blecher, Richard

P. Young, and Edward Gibson. Jeffrey Winters would also like

to thank the participants at his talk on “Oligarchy and the

American Case” at Oberlin College in October 2006; at his

November 2007 talk on “Oligarchyand Elite Rule” at North-

western University’s Buffett Center for International and Com-

parative Studies; and the probing discussions in 2008 at

Northwestern with the members of Timothy Earle’s “Chief-

tancy Working Group.”

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Vol. 7/No. 4 731

In presenting these ideas, we seek to advance the

research agenda heralded by the American Political Sci-

ence Association’s 2004 Task Force on Inequality and

American Democracy, and recently advanced by Bartels

and Page and Jacobs.

3

Indeed, although the theme of the

2006 American Political Science Association Conference

was “Power Reconsidered,” our basic point is that polit-

ical science as a whole and the American politics subﬁeld

in particular needs to treat power, especially in its mate-

rial form, much more seriously than it recently has done.

The Theory of Oligarchy

We adopt a deﬁnition derived from Aristotle: oligarchy

involves the exercise of power by the richest citizens—who

happen always to be “the few.”

4

Oligarchy refers broadly

to extreme political inequalities that necessarily accom-

pany extreme material inequalities. Oligarchs are actors

who personally command or control massive concentra-

tions of wealth—a material form of power that is distinct

from all other power resources, and which can be readily

deployed for political purposes. This materialist interpre-

tation of oligarchy was dominant from Antiquity until the

emergence of elite theory at the end of the nineteenth

century, when scholars such as Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo

Pareto, and Robert Michels stretched the analysis of oli-

garchy to include power resources other than wealth. The

concept of oligarchy then lost clarity and explanatory value

by being blended with notions of elite power. Pareto, for

instance, saw liberal democracies as sham “demogagic

plutocracies,” in which politicians, party bosses, union

leaders, capitalists, and other elites engage in patron-client

relations fed by money ﬂows.

5

More recent attempts to

deﬁne oligarchs and oligarchy, particularly in the US con-

text, have foundered for a variety of reasons—the most

important being that oligarchy has mistakenly been con-

strued as incompatible, both conceptually and function-

ally, with democracy. We argue that oligarchy limits

democracy but does not render it a sham.

In our view, oligarchs and oligarchy can best be deﬁned

and understood by focusing at the individual level on

power resources, particularly material power resources as

manifested in wealth.

6

There are three aspects of material

wealth that have led it to serve as a unique and persistent

source of political power throughout much of human civ-

ilization. First, wealth has generally been highly concen-

trated among a very few citizens. Second, material wealth

of whatever sort (money in the bank, equity ownership of

corporations, ownership of landed estates) has—in virtu-

ally all times and places—been easily translatable into sub-

stantial political inﬂuence. Third, the ownership of material

wealth carries with it a set of political interests: interests in

preserving and protecting that wealth, interests in ensur-

ing its free use for many purposes, and interests in acquir-

ing more wealth. That is, highly concentrated material

wealth generally brings with it both enormous political

power and the motivation to use that power in order to

win certain kinds of political-economic outcomes. Posses-

sion of great wealth deﬁnes membership in an oligarchy,

provides the means to exert oligarchic power, and pro-

vides the incentives to use that power for the core political

objective of wealth defense (which, depending on the

national and historical context, means property defense,

income defense, or both).

The power resources approach to oligarchs and oligar-

chy underscores the importance of power capacities, or, as

Isaac framed it in his critique of the faces-of-power debate,

“power to” rather than “power over.”

7

Clearly wealth is not the only source of political power.

Power can also proceed from holding formal political ofﬁce,

from enjoying political rights (such as “one person, one

vote” under a democratic electoral system), from personal

or organizational capacity to mobilize others, and from

coercive capacity or armed force. (In most modern poli-

ties, however, the coercive function is largely monopo-

lized by the state.) Our argument is only that wealth is

consistently a major source of political power and that it is

often the most important source with respect to certain

policies. In many or most political systems, concentrated

wealth in the hands of a small fraction of a community’s

members is a particularly versatile and potent source of

political power. During the politics of the ordinary, wealth

can hire or persuade the wielders of other political resources.

In extraordinary times, severe threats to property and wealth

can provoke the richest citizens to engage in destabilizing

and sometimes violent political and economic reactions.

A distinctive quality of political power based on wealth

is that it does not depend upon extensive investments of

time or action by wealthy individuals themselves, nor does

it rely for its potency on mobilization and coordination

among oligarchs. The wealthy often control large organi-

zations, such as business corporations, that can act for

them. They can hire armies of professional, skilled actors

from the middle and upper-middle classes who labor as

salaried advocates and defenders of core oligarchic inter-

ests. In modern societies these actors are often denizens of

foundations, think tanks, politically connected law ﬁrms,

consultancies, and lobbying organizations. Sometimes they

are politicians or ofﬁcials recruited and funded by the

wealthy. They blend smoothly into the complex give and

take of pluralist politics, but their character, focus, and

effect is different: it is to advance the basic material inter-

ests of the wealthy.

The literatures on oligarchy and democracy usually view

the two political arrangements as mutually exclusive. We

view them as compatible and often fused. Thus it does not

follow from our argument that the wealthy dominate all

facets of politics. In a formally democratic political system,

Dahlian pluralistic struggles—and even segmented (not gen-

eral or revolutionary) mass mobilizations—may carry the

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Oligarchy in the United States?

732 Perspectives on Politics

day on many issues involving such matters as race, women,

gays, ethnicity, religion, morality, guns, or the environ-

ment.

8

These are issues of great importance to many ordi-

nary citizens, but of only limited and cross-cutting concern

to the wealthy. We are arguing here that the earlier critics of

“the biases of pluralism” were onto something, that the

skewed distribution of wealth in the United States is a source

of oligarchy, and that US political scientists, and especially

scholars of American politics, ought to pay much more atten-

tion to these issues than they do.

9

To the extent that they

have failed to do this, the ﬁeld, in spite of its increasing tech-

nical sophistication, has made less progress than many like

to believe.

10

The extent and character of oligarchic power varies

according to place and historical period, from wild and

unconstrained to tamed and restricted. In some countries,

oligarchs still have layered upon them power linked to

race or ethnicity, noble birth, or religion. But oligarchic

power always covers issues that affect the core material

interests of the wealthy in safeguarding claims to what

they have and permitting the acquisition of more. Dis-

tinctly oligarchic interests are focused on wealth defense,

which has two components: property defense (avoiding

conﬁscation by force) and income defense (avoiding legal

redistribution of otherwise secure private property). From

the time of the ﬁrst civilizations until the rise of the mod-

ern state, oligarchs devoted most of their attention to prop-

erty defense and were compelled to make major investments

in capacities for violence and coercion. The advent of secure

and institutionalized arrangements for property defense has

allowed oligarchs to focus far more on defending income.

In the US case this means deﬂecting redistributive taxation

and shifting the burdens of social welfare downward to the

less afﬂuent. In modern societies it has also meant the legal

creation and protection of limited liability corporations and

the facilitation of their global reach through open markets,

free trade, and investment of capital abroad.

It would be too risky to leave potentially divisive, extreme

asymmetries of wealth to the mercies of pure democ-

racy.

11

The rise of representative democracy involved a

difﬁcult and delicately executed trade-off of property secu-

rity for the richest and historically most powerful actors in

exchange for universal suffrage for the unpropertied masses.

Whenever this bargain has broken down (and since World

War II it has done so only in poorer states where institu-

tions are weak), democracy has broken down with it. This

same arrangement that guarantees the property of the

wealthiest against serious threats forms the basis of the

fusion between oligarchy and democracy.

Once a stable oligarchic-mass settlement is in place—

often accompanied by an “elite settlement”—so that seri-

ous threats to oligarchy disappear, a democratic “politics

of the ordinary” can proceed to govern many issues of

little interest to oligarchs as a group.

12

Dahlian polyarchy

can blossom within a broad—though not unlimited—

sphere in which voice, organization, and voting matter.

An oligarchic-mass settlement, in which masses of ordi-

nary citizens are persuaded to accept the key requirements

of oligarchs, permits a classic Aristotelian fusion in which

oligarchy respects and allows democracy and liberal free-

doms, so long as democracy respects and allows oligarchy.

A thriving oligarchy in the richest and most politically

developed nations implies a limited, rather than a sham,

democracy.

It is important to recognize that oligarchy can operate

without explicit coordination or cohesion among oli-

garchs. School ties, clubs, social networks, interlocking

directorates and the like among the wealthy can be inter-

esting and important, but they are not necessary to enable

oligarchs to act in unison. The common material interests

of the wealthy can be sufﬁcient for that. In key realms,

common interests lead nearly all wealthy individuals to

seek the same sorts of policies. Moreover, the wealthy often

constitute a “privileged group” in Mancur Olson’s sense:

one or more individuals with extreme wealth can gain so

much from, say, a free trade agreement or a regressive tax

cut that they have incentives to act on their own.

13

There

is no need to cooperate or coordinate with other wealthy

individuals. Ordinary citizens, by contrast, though very

much affected in the aggregate, usually have far less at

stake as individuals and are more divided than the super-

rich. For non-oligarchs, any effort to mobilize faces for-

midable collective action problems.

The common material interests of the wealthy help over-

come any threat to oligarchy that might result from the

circulation of elites and the replacement of individual oli-

garchs by newcomers. Individuals who start from modest

beginnings and acquire great wealth usually learn rather

quickly that they have new material interests. The occa-

sional renegade is no match for the monolithic power and

shared interests of the oligarchy as a whole.

14

Indeed, Mosca

and Pareto pointed out long ago that elite circulation brings

new vigor to an oligarchy and strengthens its legitimacy.

The US Case

Does an identiﬁable oligarchy exist in the United States?

If so, how do oligarchs overcome the democratic features

of the political system and circumvent majority rule on

certain issues? Over what policy domains, if any, do they

exert decisive inﬂuence?

A useful starting point is to consider the extent of eco-

nomic inequality in the United States. Economic inequal-

ity may be taken as an indicator of highly concentrated

material resources for inﬂuencing politics (the primary

condition for the existence of oligarchy) and perhaps also

as evidence of non-majoritarian public policies—of the

failure of a democratic political system to redress market-

based inequalities that disadvantage large majorities of the

population.

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Vol. 7/No. 4 733

The story is a familiar one: since about 1973 the real

wages and family incomes of average Americans have lagged

behind productivity gains and have mostly stagnated, while

those at the very top of the income distribution have pros-

pered spectacularly. The result has been very high—and

sharply increased—inequality.

15

For the year 2005, for

example, Piketty and Saez—using IRS income tax data,

which probably understate top incomes—found that the

top 1 percent of Americans (more precisely, the top 1

percent of “tax units”)

16

received the largest share of

national income they had enjoyed since 1928: more than

one ﬁfth of it. The top 300,000 Americans collectively

received almost as much income as the bottom 150 mil-

lion. Per taxpayer, the top group received 440 times as

much as the average in the bottom half, nearly doubling

the gap from 1980.

17

The sharp increase in economic inequality can be illus-

trated by the greatly increased gap between the earnings of

average factory or service workers and the earnings of the

chief executive ofﬁcers of the ﬁrms they work for. In 1973

the average CEO in major companies earned approxi-

mately 27 times as much as the average worker, a substan-

tial premium. But in 2005, when the average worker earned

$41,861, the average CEO was paid $10,980,000: 262

times as much.

18

Even more dramatic is what has happened to incomes at

the very top. In 2006, three managers of hedge funds each

took home more than one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000,

one thousand million dollars) in income, putting to shame

the mere $10 million received by the average CEO. Their

combined income was $4.4 billion, with the top earner,

James Simons, making $1.7 billion, followed by Kenneth

Grifﬁn and Edward Lampert earning $1.4 and $1.3 bil-

lion, respectively. The top 25 hedge fund managers got a

total of $14 billion in 2006, more than the gross domestic

product of Jordan or Uruguay—that is, enough to double

the income of every person in one of those countries.

19

Incredibly, hedge fund managers did even better in 2007:

the total take of the top twenty-ﬁve jumped from $14 bil-

lion to $22 billion. The top ﬁve each took home more than

$1 billion. John Paulson earned about $3.7 billion; George

Soros made $2.9 billion; and James Simons got $2.8 bil-

lion, now ranking only third despite making $1.1 billion

more in 2007 than 2006.

20

Of course many top income earners have faced steep

drops in income with the 2008–2009 economic crash;

ﬁgures for 2009, when available, will certainly be lower.

But it is far from clear that the extent of inequality in

incomes has been affected. Those on the bottom—suffering

pay and beneﬁt cuts and sometimes losing jobs altogether—

have taken very sharp percentage hits as well, which may

have left the shape of income distribution much the same.

Consider that every citizen has an individual power

proﬁle based on the power resources he or she can deploy.

One person’s power proﬁle might be very low because

although he has a right to vote (part of the power proﬁle

of all registered adult citizens), he is unmobilized and has

almost no spare material resources. Another person’s power

proﬁle might be very high by virtue of holding an ofﬁce

like senator or being a Supreme Court justice. Yet another

person’s individual power proﬁle might be high because

she is capable of mobilizing tens of thousands of other

citizens to act in concert. And ﬁnally, there is the person

whose power proﬁle is dominated more than anything

else by ownership of massive material resources in the

form of income or wealth.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that money income

can be translated easily and directly into political power

and—as a ﬁrst cut into the problem—that it translates on

a one-to-one basis: twice the income produces twice the

political power, and so forth.

21

A search for oligarchy in

the United States, then, could begin by calculating exactly

how much income the richest Americans get as a multiple

of the income earned by most other Americans. This ratio

could be used as a ﬁrst, rough estimate of the political

power of potential oligarchs.

22

An effort to calculate such

an income-based Material Power Index for individuals (or,

more precisely, tax units) is presented in the third column

of table 1.

In table 1 the bottom 90 percent of Americans—the

vast majority of the US population, including most of the

middle and upper middle classes—are taken as the base-

line. The average income of tax units in the bottom 90

percent ($29,143 in 2005) is arbitrarily assigned a power

index score of 1.0. That is, the average member of the

bottom 90 percent is treated as having exactly 1 unit of

political power. (Note that this treatment ignores very sub-

stantial inequalities within the 90 percent, which have

been the subject of many survey-based studies of unequal

political voice. We are concerned here chieﬂy with the

very top of the income distribution, which is too small to

show up in most survey samples representative of the whole

population.)

Reading upwards from the bottom of the third column

of table 1, the average incomes of increasingly small but

increasingly afﬂuent groups of Americans are expressed as

multiples of the average income of the bottom 90 percent,

producing ﬁgures for the Individual Material Power Index

that rise markedly as one moves toward the top of the

table. By this income-based measure of material political

resources, each member of the top 10 percent of income

earners averaged 8.5 times as much political power as the

average member of the bottom 90 percent. Each member

of the top 1 percent averaged 38.1 times as much; each of

the top tenth of 1 percent, 190.7 times as much; and each

member of the top hundredth of 1 percent of income

earners averaged a remarkable 882.8 times as much income-

based political power as the average member of the bot-

tom 90 percent of income earners. These discrepancies are

vastly greater than the SES- or income-related biases and

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734 Perspectives on Politics

political inequalities that show up in standard, survey-

based studies of mass political participation.

23

Would this degree of concentrated power be sufﬁcient to

establish the existence of oligarchy in the United States?Strik-

ing as these ﬁgures are, they still leave room for doubt.The

groups that include the highest-income, most powerful indi-

viduals are quite small, so that the total power wielded by

those groups may not be overwhelming. We have tried to

take this into account with a “Total Group” Material Power

Index—shown in the fourth column of the table—which

calculates the income-based resources of each income group

(that is, the total income received by the group) as a per-

centage of all income received in the country. By this mea-

sure the power of the highest income earners looks less

imposing. The tiny group consisting of the top hundredth

of 1 percent of income earners, for example, together has

“only” about 5 percent of all the income-based power in the

country.The top tenth of 1 percent together have only about

11 percent of it. And the top 1 percent have “only” about

22 percent of the total income-based power.

On the other hand, one may consider it to be rather

sobering that by this measure the top 10 percent of the

population has about as much material-based political

power as the entire bottom 90 percent. This may or may

not be a deﬁnitive sign of oligarchy, but it certainly does

not look like pure, one-person one-vote democracy. Fur-

thermore, higher-income people are probably able to deploy

more of their incomes for politics, more effectively, than

are those on the bottom. The bottom 90 percent face

formidable collective action and communications prob-

lems, and they must spend a much higher proportion of

their incomes on necessities. For similar reasons ﬁscal soci-

ologists have argued that just a 4 percent ownership share

in a large organization (such as a business corporation) is

often sufﬁcient to control the organization.

24

In any case, the picture changes when we recall the

Aristotelian deﬁnition of oligarchy, which focuses on wealth

rather than income. Most of the resources of the working

and middle classes are not available for political action.

Their income has to go for day-to-day necessities. Great

wealth, on the other hand, can command political inﬂu-

ence even when the wealth-owner’s annual income is low

or negative. Many of the wealthiest individuals maintain

large savings that can be readily tapped. And illiquid wealth

can serve as collateral for loans that can be spent on pol-

itics. Furthermore, without anyone spending a dime, wealth

can pose a threat to—can hover as a dark cloud of poten-

tial retaliation above—any politician who might threaten

the interests of wealth holders. Thus wealth is more rele-

vant to political power than income. And it is more highly

concentrated in fewer hands. A focus on wealth provides

stronger evidence for the existence of oligarchy.

We now know a fair amount about the distribution of

wealth in the United States. One good source of data is

the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) by the Federal

Reserve Board, which regularly (every three years since

1983) has gathered information on the elusive upper ranges

of the wealth distribution by over-sampling the very rich

and by imputing information on items for which survey

responses are unreliable. Using SCF data and a deﬁnition

of wealth based on “marketable” net worth (excluding con-

sumer durables and pension rights beyond currently real-

izable value, but including owner-occupied homes as well

as other real estate, cash, savings deposits, bonds, cash

surrender value of life insurance, stock, equity in unincor-

porated businesses, and trust funds, minus all debt), Edward

Wolff has calculated that in 2004 the top 1 percent of US

wealth-holding households had fully 34.3 percent of all

the wealth in the country, while the bottom 40 percent of

wealth holders had just 0.2 percent of the total. The top 1

percent held, on average, $14,786,000 in net worth (up

78 percent in real terms since 1983), whereas the bottom

40 percent averaged only a meager $2,200 in net worth—

down 59 percent since 1983.

25

Table 1

Income-based material power indices

Fraction of taxpayers Average income Individual Power Index Total Group Power Index

Top 1/100 of 1% $25,726,965 882.8 5.1%

Top 1/10 of 1% $5,556,963 190.7 10.9%

Top 1% $1,111,560 38.1 21.8%

Top 10% $246,853 8.5 48.5%

Bottom 90% $29,143 1.0 51.5%

Source: http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/TabFig2005prel.xlx, Tables A0, A3, A6, revised 3/12/07, updating Piketty and Saez (2003);

computations by the present authors. Based on IRS tabulations of individual income tax returns for 2005, CPS-estimated number

of potential tax units, and National Income Accounts total income figures. Income and rankings include realized capital gains.

The Individual Power Index for each income fractile is a ratio, calculated as the average income for that fractile divided by the

average income of the bottom 90%. The Total Group Power Index for a fractile is the percentage of total national income received

by that group. Except for the bottom 90%, each group is inclusive of the smaller groups above it.

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Vol. 7/No. 4 735

The concentration of wealth looks even greater when

one considers a more politically relevant deﬁnition: “ﬁnan-

cial” or “non-home” wealth, including all the above items

except the net value of owner-occupied residences. In recent

decades home equity has constituted between one-quarter

and one-third of all the wealth in the United States (33.5

percent in 2004), and it is much more evenly distributed

than other wealth.

26

But most people view their homes as

places to live, not as resources for political investment.

Home equity loans have mostly gone for home improve-

ments or other consumption rather than political action.

(Indeed the recent plunge in housing prices highlights the

hazards of treating home equity as a usable asset for any

purpose.) In analyzing material resources available to inﬂu-

ence politics, therefore, it makes sense to look at non-

home wealth.

When Wolff did so, he found that in 2004 the top 10

percent of wealth holders—taken together—had 80.9 per-

cent of all the non-home wealth in the country; the top

20 percent had 92.5 percent of it. The top 1 percent of

wealth holders had a remarkable 42.2 percent of all the

non-home wealth in the country—close to half of it. Their

average of $13,485,000 each in non-home wealth far out-

weighed that of the bottom 40 percent, who in fact had

negative net wealth: setting aside home equity, they were,

on average, $8,700 in debt.

27

There can be little doubt, then, that the wealthiest Amer-

ican households have enormous material resources avail-

able to be used for political inﬂuence, vastly greater

resources than other Americans. In table 2 we present

wealth-based Material Power Indices for increasingly afﬂu-

ent, smaller fractions of the population as one goes from

the bottom to the top of the table. Both Individual and

Total Group power indices are given. The bottom section

of the table—which we will discuss ﬁrst—is based on

Wolff’s analysis of the 2004 SCF data.

The wealth-based Material Power Index for individu-

als

28

in the third column of the table indicates that each

of the top 10 percent of American households had on

average about 22 times the political power of the average

member of the bottom 90 percent. Each member of the

top 1 percent averaged more than 100 times the power of

a member of the bottom 90 percent; about 200 times if

the index is calculated in terms of the more politically

relevant non-home wealth. These ﬁgures are much higher

than the corresponding income-based entries in table 1.

Again, many top wealth-holders have lost vast sums in the

economic crash, but the extent of inequality may not have

changed because percentage losses at the bottom (where

most wealth consists of home equity) may have been as

great or greater.

The wealth-based Material Power Index for total groups

begins to make a more substantial case for the existence

of oligarchy. By this measure the top 1 percent of

households—with about one third (34.3 percent) of the

net worth and close to half (42.2 percent) of all the

Table 2

Wealth-based material power indices

Fraction of Adult Population Average Wealth Individual Power Index Total Group Power Index

Forbes 400 list of richest Americans (2000: Kopczuk & Saez)

Top 5/100,000 of 1% (n = 101) $8,191,000,000 59,619

a

2.5%

Top 2/10,000 of 1% (n = 404) $3,000,000,000 21,836

a

3.7%

Estate tax method (2000: Kopczuk & Saez)

Top 1/100 of 1% $63,564,000 462.7

a

3.9%

Top 1/10 of 1% $14,786,000 107.6

a

9.1%

Top 1% $3,392,000 24.7

a

20.8%

Survey of Consumer Finances (2004: Wolff)

Top 1% of households $14,786,000

($13,485,000 non-home)

107.6

(199.4 based on

non-home wealth)

34.3%

(42.2% based on

non-home wealth)

Top 10% $3,068,000 22.3 71.2%

Bottom 90% $137,389

($67,611 non-home)

1.0 28.7%

(19.1 non-home)

Sources: Kopczuk and Saez (2004a, tables 1,2,3,6; 2004b, table B2); Wolff 2007, tables 2,4); computations by the present authors.

Based on net worth including home equity except where noted. Calculated for the adult (age 20 and over) population except where

noted. The Individual power Index for each member of a wealth fractile is a ratio, calculated as average wealth of that fractile divided

by the average wealth of the bottom 90%. The Total Group power index is calculated as the percentage of all US wealth possessed

by that fractile. Except for the bottom 90%, all groups are inclusive of the smaller groups above them.

ahe denominator figure for average wealth of the bottom 90% of adults is approximated by Wolff’s SCF-based 2004 data for

households.

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736 Perspectives on Politics

non-home wealth-based power resources in the country—

would seem to have more than enough resources to exert

dominant political power over the issues of greatest impor-

tance to them, especially since the rest of the top 10

percent might be allies or (at worst) neutral on many

such issues. The entire bottom 90 percent of the citi-

zenry, taken together, have less total wealth-based power

than the top 1 percent.

Does this make the top 1 percent of wealth holders

potential oligarchs? The top 1 percent is a fairly large

group of some 3,000,000 Americans, perhaps too large to

constitute an oligarchy. Moreover, it includes many upper-

middle class managers and professionals (possibly even

readers of this article) who do not think of themselves as

oligarchs. Perhaps they are not. What if we continue the

search for oligarchs into higher reaches of the wealth dis-

tribution? What can we say about the power of the top

tenth of 1 percent, the top hundredth of 1 percent, or still

smaller groups of the most afﬂuent Americans?

The SCF data, even with over-samples of the rich, can-

not tell us much about such tiny slivers of the population.

For that we need to turn to estate tax records, which catch

most of the very top wealth holders at death and which

can be used (if one accepts certain assumptions about

age-, gender-, and wealth-speciﬁc probabilities of death)

to draw inferences about the distribution of wealth among

the living. We believe that this “estate multiplier” method

unfortunately leads to serious underestimates of top wealth

amounts and wealth shares, for a variety of reasons: eva-

sion and avoidance of the estate tax; a narrowed deﬁnition

of wealth (excluding, for example, human capital in closely

held proprietorships that may vanish at the proprietor’s

death); a focus on individuals rather than households. Still,

these data can tell us something.

The best available analysis of estate-tax data, carried

out by Kopczuk and Saez through the year 2000, was used

to calculate the middle section of table 2.

29

Comparison

of the middle section of table 2 with the bottom and the

top sections strongly suggests that top wealth shares were

indeed underestimated by the estate tax method: the top 1

percent of individuals, for example, are seen by the estate-

tax method as having just 20.8 percent of all the net worth,

as opposed to the highly reliable SCF estimate of 34.3

percent for households. And the top hundredth of 1 per-

cent individuals are estimated by the estate-tax method to

have just 3.9 percent of the wealth, whereas calculations

based on the detailed Forbes data on the 400 richest

Americans—a far smaller group—indicate that they had a

nearly equal 3.7 percent.

Still, despite this major underestimation of wealth con-

centration, the Individual Material Power Index based on

the estate tax data indicates that each of the top 1 percent

of wealth holders had on average about 25 times the polit-

ical power of a member of the bottom 90 percent; each of

the top tenth of 1 percent had more than 100 times; and

a member of the top hundredth of 1 percent had a hefty

463 times the power of an individual in the bottom 90

percent. The estimates of Total Group material power for

the top 1 percent, tenth of 1 percent, and hundredth of 1

percent—about 23 percent, 9 percent, and 4 percent,

respectively, of all the wealth-based power in the country—

are also very substantial. The 9 percent share held by the

top tenth of 1 percent of wealth holders, in particular,

indicates that a rather small group of very afﬂuent Amer-

icans (roughly 300,000 of them) commands the resources

to exert quite substantial political power.

Kopczuk and Saez also used the Forbes data on the very

pinnacle of wealth holders, the top 400 and top 100 rich-

est Americans, to calculate those groups’ shares of the total

wealth.

30

The results, displayed in the top section of table 2,

are quite striking. The Individual Material Power Index

indicates that each of the top 400 or so richest Americans

had on average about 22,000 times the political power of

the average member of the bottom 90 percent, and each

of the top 100 or so had nearly 60,000 times as much.

This does not look like garden-variety pluralism. TheTotal

Group power index indicates that the 400 and the 100

had 3.7 percent and 2.5 percent, respectively, of all the

wealth-based political power in the country. This might

be enough to get their way, on selected issues, even if the

entire bottom 90 percent of the citizenry disagreed—

particularly if the rest of the top 10 percent were neutral

or allied with the Forbes 400.

What should we make of this welter of numbers?

Any ﬁxed quantitative criterion used to identify oli-

garchs is bound to be arbitrary. In particular, we would

argue strongly against any mechanical rule of looking (say)

for groups that have “a majority” of the political power in

society according to some quantitative measure. We have

noted that the very afﬂuent are probably much better able

to deploy their resources fully and effectively in politics;

the less afﬂuent are constrained by ﬁnancial needs and

beset by collective action problems. Even if the data on

wealth and income are accurate, resource-based measures

of political power may well underestimate power at the

top.

The size of oligarchies (if and when they exist) is an

empirical matter that undoubtedly varies by time and place

and will require considerable effort and ingenuity to pin

down. Moreover, membership in an oligarchy is not likely

to be dichotomous (yes or no) but rather a matter of

degree; the top ﬁve hundred or one thousand wealth-

holding households in the US, for example, are likely to

wield far more political power than their less extravagantly

wealthy compatriots among the next few thousand. And

ﬁnally, not every individual possessing immense material

power necessarily uses it (although our theory of oligarchy

does not require that all oligarchs exercise their power,

only that some do and that the others tend not to use their

power against core oligarchic interests).

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Keeping these caveats in mind, we suspect that the power

share of the top tenth of 1 percent of US households may

well be sufﬁcient to dominate politics on key issues of

most intense interest to that group, when we take into

account the collective action problems of their potential

opponents among less wealthy citizens and the likely sym-

pathy or (at worst) indifference of most of the rest of the

top 10 percent. That is, for the United States at the present

time, a deﬁnitional boundary that identiﬁes the top tenth

of 1 percent of the wealthiest households as potential oli-

garchs seems fairly plausible.

The roughly 300,000 individuals in the top tenth of 1

percent far exceed in size any tiny conspiracy or cabal.

Though some of them undoubtedly network with each

other, most are not even mutually acquainted. They are

bound together—if at all—by material self-interest and

political clout, not by social ties. At the same time, a group

that constitutes just one-tenth of 1 percent of the popu-

lation is much smaller than a Marxian class or a mass-

based pluralistic interest group. And it has a much more

distinct character than a broadly deﬁned “elite.” Perhaps,

then, we have identiﬁed a set of potential oligarchs in the

United States. Do they in fact exert decisive inﬂuence over

some subset of policies? Do they actually get policies they

want? How can they possibly do so, within a formally

democratic, “one-person, one-vote” political system in

which elections are vigorously contested by competing,

mass-based political parties?

Oligarchy and Public Policy

Can we specify key policy areas in which a tiny minority

of wealthy Americans, constituting (say) just one-tenth of

1 percent of the population, consistently get their own

way? An objection immediately springs to mind. There

seems to be substantial evidence from scholarly research—

including the inﬂuential Macro Polity by Robert S. Erik-

son, Michael B. MacKuen and James A. Stimson—that

public policy in the United States responds strongly to

public opinion, to the preferences of ordinary citizens,

rather than to the wishes of some small set of oligarchs.

31

This objection turns out not to have much weight.

For one thing, the relationship that Erikson and his col-

leagues found between ideological “mood” and public

policy is highly aggregated; their analysis conceals the

fact that on many speciﬁc issues—perhaps one third of

all issues—policy actually moves in the opposite direction

from public opinion.

32

That leaves plenty of room for

the possibility that an oligarchy controls a small set of

key issues.

33

Moreover, most of the evidence of close

connections between policy and public opinion is essen-

tially bivariate. Other actors omitted from the analysis

(interest groups, afﬂuent citizens, oligarchs), whose pref-

erences are positively but not perfectly correlated with

public opinion, may be exerting the real inﬂuence and

producing a spurious relationship between public opin-

ion and policy.

Recent multivariate analyses have produced much more

sobering estimates of the extent to which ordinary citizens

inﬂuence public policy. In his study of Senate roll call

voting, for example, Larry Bartels found that higher-

income constituents had a big impact on their senators’

votes; controlling for that, undifferentiated public opin-

ion had little or no effect.

34

Similarly, Martin Gilens found

that changes in policy outputs in the United States have

generally responded to changes in the preferences of higher

income citizens, not citizens generally.

35

Jacobs and Page

found that the expressed preferences of foreign policy deci-

sion makers (which are closely aligned with actual policy)

have responded much more to the wishes of executives of

multinational ﬁrms than to the wishes of the general pub-

lic.

36

Page and Bouton (in a chapter co-written by Jacobs)

found that—in eight surveys over a 28-year period—the

preferences of foreign policy decision makers disagreed

with those of a majority of American citizens about one

quarter of the time.

37

None of these studies establishes inﬂuence over US pub-

lic policy by an oligarchy. Perhaps the Jacobs and Page

work comes closest; it points toward extensive impact on

US foreign policy—especially international economic

policy—by a very small group of owners and managers

(e.g., international vice presidents) of Fortune 1000 multi-

national corporations. For the most part, however, the

studies noted above just bolster the extensive evidence

reviewed by the APSA Task Force on Inequality and Amer-

ican Democracy, which demonstrates the prevalence of

what is sometimes called “biased pluralism”: over a wide

range of political issues, Americans with more income or

wealth generally exert more political inﬂuence than those

with less.

38

But biased pluralism is not the same thing as

oligarchy. For our purposes, the main point of this empir-

ical work is simply that it is no longer plausible (if it ever

was) to argue that US policy making reﬂects the pure

workings of populistic democracy, in which every citizen

has an equal voice. Wealth and income matter. The ques-

tion is, to what degree and on which issues?

The Jacobs and Page work also points toward one

issue area in which oligarchs may prevail: key aspects of

international economic policy. In the present globalized

economy, the international economic policies pursued by

the United States have crucial effects upon the present

and future assets of US wealth holders. Opening and

keeping open (by force if necessary) foreign markets for

US exports, imports, and investments can help preserve

wealth and greatly facilitate its further accumulation. So

can the dismantling or prevention of any barriers to free

trade, even barriers—like workplace and environmental

standards for trade partners—that are very popular with

the US public and might beneﬁt both foreign and US

workers. From GATT and WTO to NAFTA and beyond,

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Oligarchy in the United States?

738 Perspectives on Politics

there are indications that US international economic pol-

icies have been more closely attuned to US owners of

multinational capital (i.e., to some of the wealthiest Amer-

icans) than to ordinary citizens.

39

This tendency has prevailed under Democratic as well

as Republican administrations, just as it would have to do

if oligarchs were to maintain effective control over long

periods of time. Indeed, according to one study, the peak

in recorded disagreements between foreign policy deci-

sion makers and majorities of the US public on inter-

national economic policy issues—disagreement on fully

50 percent of all issues surveyed—came in 1994, when

Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses of

Congress and when Robert Rubin, formerly a top partner

in the Goldman Sachs investment banking ﬁrm, served as

Secretary of the Treasury.

40

This tendency has persisted at

least since the second New Deal, when capital-intensive,

multi-nationally oriented ﬁrms had become a major seg-

ment of the US economy (hence a major source of wealth)

and when a subset of their owners and managers invested

in the Democratic Party.

41

A second issue area that seems a likely candidate for pos-

sible oligarchic rule is ﬁnancial and monetary policy. Mon-

etary policy—while complex and far outside the ken of most

ordinary citizens—is of central interest to the wealthy, nearly

all of whom strongly favor high interest rates and “sound

money” except during ﬁnancial panics, when easy money

may be preferred. Wealthy holders of dollar-denominated

debt (e.g., bonds), in particular, ordinarily have a keen inter-

est in preventing inﬂation, which would erode the value of

their capital, while inﬂation would lighten the burdens of

those with heavy ﬁxed debts. (Unanticipated inﬂation causes

the real value of ﬁxed-dollar assets to decline.)This was the

heart of the famous conﬂicts over currency and debt that

animated the Founders of our country, who made sure

(through Article I, Section 10 of the Constitution) that no

state could again issue inﬂationary paper money to ease debt-

ors’ obligations—in the way that Rhode Island had done

for its poor farmers, which Madison alluded to as an

“improper or wicked” project.

42

Related conﬂicts over the

gold standard erupted at several points in the nineteenth

century, culminating in the decisive 1896 rejection of the

free coinage of silver.

More recently the Federal Reserve Board has diligently

fought against inﬂation, even avoiding expansionary pol-

icies at the outset of the Great Depression and squeezing

the economy when oil prices rose in the 1970s.

43

US mon-

etary policy has taken a shape consistent with the possi-

bility of oligarchic rule.

44

The 2008–2009 bailout of

ﬁnancial institutions, in which hundreds of billions of

dollars went mostly to bankers and bond-holders with

little help for homeowners or accountability to taxpayers,

also seems consistent with oligarchy.

45

A third and very important issue area is tax policy. Elite

settlements and oligarchic peace imply that stable politi-

cal, ideological, and legal arrangements are in place that

permit small minorities of the population to hold immense

wealth and earn mind-boggling salaries without fear of

conﬁscation or other threats to their social position. With

basic rights to private property ﬁrmly established and

secure, a critical material and political battleground con-

cerns taxation. Most of the wealthy do not want a sub-

stantial portion of their income or wealth taken by

progressive taxes and redistributed to the less afﬂuent.

Throughout American history, with only brief redistrib-

utive interludes (particularly during World War I, the Great

Depression, and World War II), the US tax system has

been very gentle with our wealthiest citizens. The idea of a

progressive income tax was ﬁercely resisted for many years.

46

In recent decades tax progressivity has been thoroughly

defanged by exemptions, deductions and loopholes, so

that the effective (as versus nominal) tax rates on the high-

est income earners have never been very steep. Rate cuts at

the top have accentuated the process. The treatment of

wealth itself has been particularly lenient, with no tax at

all on unrealized capital gains (increases in the value of

assets not “realized” through a sale) and a special, low

rate—now just 15 percent—on realized, long-term gains

from the sale of stock, bonds, commercial real estate and

the like. The George W. Bush administration was espe-

cially solicitous in reducing taxes on the wealthy. But twelve

Democratic senators also voted for the 2001 cuts.

47

Related to taxes but going beyond them, the combined,

over-all redistributive impact of all government policies taken

together may be the issue of most central concern to the

extremely wealthy, who generally do not want their wealth

or income taken away and given to others. In principle, in

order to calculate the actual redistributive impact of gov-

ernment action one should compare “pre-” and “post-

government” distributions of income. This is not easy to

do. The “pre” situation is purely hypothetical; govern-

ment actions affect all sorts of ostensibly private market

outcomes, and it is hard to untangle those effects (e.g., of

subsidies, labor market regulations, or tax burdens that

may be “shifted” onto people other than the nominal pay-

ers). Moreover, it is hard to calculate the “post” govern-

ment value to individuals or households of non-cash

transfers, let alone public goods like defense or law and

order.

An overly simple but suggestive approach is to compare

Current Population Survey data on households’ “market

income” (all before-tax income except government trans-

fer payments, including imputed net capital gains and

imputed rent on owner-occupied homes, subtracting

imputed work expenses) with data on “disposable income”

(which adds government cash and non-cash transfers and

subtracts payroll taxes, income taxes, and property taxes

for owner-occupied homes). The most recently analyzed

CPS data indicate that there was a signiﬁcant drop in

inequality between market income (a Gini coefﬁcient of

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Vol. 7/No. 4 739

0.493) and disposable income (a Gini of 0.418), chieﬂy

because Social Security and other social insurance pay-

ments go mostly to very low-income people.

48

But this

effect is modest at best. Disposable incomes remain highly

unequal. The lowest quintile (20 percent) of income earn-

ers, in the aggregate, get a minuscule 1.50 percent of total

market income in the United States; their 4.42 percent

share of disposable income is substantially higher but still

quite small. The top quintile’s 53.83 percent share of mar-

ket income drops only a little, to 47.28 percent of dispos-

able income. In other words, according to this measure

the totality of government action in the United States

leaves the top ﬁfth of Americans with ten times as much

income as the bottom ﬁfth.

49

More sophisticated studies have tried to take account of

additional government effects, making “pre-” and “post-

ﬁsc” comparisons that involve particular incidence assump-

tions or general equilibrium models. They have generally

come to similar conclusions: taxes, spending and regula-

tory policies by US federal, state and local governments,

taken all together, do not have a very great net effect on

the distribution of income.

50

That is, US governments

have not greatly moderated the high inequality in eco-

nomic outcomes produced by private markets, even dur-

ing the period of sharply increasing inequality since the

early 1970s. This may be just what oligarchs want.

Our brief discussion of international economic policy,

monetary policy, taxation, and the over-all distributional

consequences of government action is only intended to be

suggestive. We have by no means established the fact of

oligarchic rule in those areas. Nor have we ruled it out

with respect to other policies. Those are topics for future

research. For now, it is enough to say that there are plau-

sible reasons to suspect that an oligarchy may dominate

certain narrowly deﬁned but very important areas of pol-

icy making in the United States. The next question is:

how might this be possible within formally democratic

rules of the game? Through what mechanisms might a

tiny oligarchy dominate aspects of policy making within a

substantially democratic political system?

Mechanisms of Influence

Existing research on American politics suggests that there

may exist mechanisms or pathways of inﬂuence by which

a very small set of oligarchs could—to a far greater extent

than their numbers alone would suggest—have a major

impact on policy outcomes. These mechanisms can be

conveniently grouped into three categories: lobbying, elec-

toral impact, and opinion shaping.

51

The US Constitu-

tion may also contribute to oligarchy.

Lobbying

Lobbying—broadly construed to include all efforts out-

side of elections to inﬂuence government policy, through

contact and communication with government ofﬁcials—

has been the subject of a great deal of research and writing

in the pluralist theoretical tradition. We are all familiar

with the techniques that lobbyists and politically con-

nected law ﬁrms use to try to inﬂuence legislation, regu-

lations, court decisions, and executive actions: establishing

personal relationships and shared perspectives with ofﬁ-

cials through socializing, gifts and contributions, trips,

friendship networks, revolving-door employment, and the

like; working out detailed policy positions through foun-

dations, think-tanks, and in-house research operations;

and communicating those positions through testimony at

hearings, ofﬁcial advisory groups, commissions and task

forces, legal briefs and lawsuits, drafts of rules and legisla-

tion, informal meetings in social settings, and strategically

placed memos and phone calls, as well as organized inﬂuxes

of communications from real or simulated “grass roots”

sources.

52

We also know that in recent years such lobbying activ-

ities, particularly by “K Street” organizations in Wash-

ington, DC, have become highly professionalized and

extremely expensive.

53

This gives a big advantage to those

who are able and willing to invest large sums of money—

including potential oligarchs. We have long known that

the universe of Washington lobbyists and lobbying orga-

nization is quite unrepresentative of the US population

as a whole: it tilts heavily toward business and profes-

sional groups.

54

Any countervailing power by organized

labor—which now covers less than 15% of the work

force—has faded.

55

The pluralist dream of balance among

competing interest groups is largely discredited. Mancur

Olson’s logic of collective action demolished Truman’s

and others’ argument that “potential” groups will auto-

matically form to protect the unorganized.

56

Some—though by no means all—business groups may

speak for an oligarchy of major wealth holders. Organiza-

tions like the Business Roundtable, the US Chamber of

Commerce, and the National Association of Manufactur-

ers, for example, have often but not always represented

owners and managers of the very largest US corporations,

in which the wealthiest Americans have substantial own-

ership shares. Such ﬁrms also often have Washington rep-

resentation on their own. (Other business lobbies speak

for narrow sectors of business or for small- to medium-

sized ﬁrms; neither they nor professional organizations of

doctors, lawyers and the like should be considered as rep-

resenting oligarchs—though on issues of major concern,

such as sound money and low taxes, they may share oli-

garchs’ preferences and serve as useful allies.)

A particularly promising avenue for oligarchic inﬂu-

ence may involve what have been characterized as “policy

planning” activities. The owners of great wealth are well

situated to invest large amounts of money in policy-

oriented foundations and think tanks, to fund scholars

and their publications, and to communicate their

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Oligarchy in the United States?

740 Perspectives on Politics

oligarchy-friendly policy ideas to decision makers.

57

The

wealthiest Americans, as individuals, also tend to have

exceptionally good personal access to high ofﬁcials. If

Bill Gates wants a phone conversation or a personal meet-

ing (publicized or secret) with the President of the United

States, there is a good chance he will get it. Charles

Lindblom has pointed out that top business leaders enjoy

a “privileged position” for their views since, in a private

enterprise system, they can purport to speak for job cre-

ation and the health of the economy as a whole.

58

But does all this activity actually inﬂuence policy? Stu-

dents of American politics have taken a wide range of

positions on this question, some of them extremely skep-

tical. Quantitative researchers, for example, have often

failed to ﬁnd solid evidence of impacts upon policy mak-

ing by money or organized interests.

59

But this may sim-

ply reﬂect the inherent difﬁculty of designing quantitative

research that can pin down some of the most complex,

sensitive and secretive phenomena in politics. Neither

the wealthy nor politicians have an interest in disclosing

direct inﬂuences by the former upon the latter. Indirect

inﬂuence (e.g., through foundations, think tanks, and

the like) can be extremely subtle and complex. What is

one to count? What sorts of variables should be regressed

on what?

60

We believe that if one wants to understand the political

world it is essential to employ multiple methods of inquiry.

The best available evidence on the political impact of

money probably comes from case studies—contemporary

or historical—by journalists, political scientists, and his-

torians. Journalists or scholars who prowl the corridors of

power often see things they are not supposed to see and

pick up relevant boasts, accusations and downright gossip

that (even if disdained by some social scientists) can help

clarify mysterious political events. Such material, together

with process-tracing investigations (ﬁnding, for example,

that large monetary contributions are followed by strong

policy advocacy in private meetings and by policy success)

can lead to reasonable inferences of inﬂuence that are con-

vincing to all but the most die-hard skeptics.

61

Some of the best scholarly evidence is based on research

in historical archives, where private papers often reveal

more about the tactics of the wealthy and the calculations

of politicians than present-day observations or interviews

can do. The ﬁndings by Ferguson, Swenson, Domhoff,

Berkowitz and McQuaid, and others of a pivotal role by

top business leaders in designing and enacting key New

Deal programs, for example, suggests that perhaps noth-

ing really big can happen in American politics without

support from at least some sizeable faction of the wealth-

iest Americans.

62

Conversely, when an oligarchy is reason-

ably uniﬁed perhaps it generally gets its way. By 1980, for

example, most US businesses and wealthy individuals, pres-

sured by global competition and fearful of costs at home,

turned against taxes, social welfare spending, and regula-

tory policies, apparently fueling the subsequent “right turn”

in American Politics.

63

David Cay Johnston’s work on the armies of skilled

professionals who are engaged at very high salaries to ensure

that the wealthiest Americans can avoid taxation is illumi-

nating.

64

The techniques of these professionals include

two stealth components that generally ﬂy under the radar

of ordinary pluralist politics. They are employed ﬁrst to

generate a morass of tax code that is so arcane and relevant

to such a small number of super-wealthy individuals that

even specialists and auditors at the I.R.S. cannot keep

pace. Second, they navigate the enabling morass of code

to generate “tax letters” and daring shelters that allow the

richest citizens to withhold tens of billions from the pub-

lic treasury. Tracking down these schemes and unraveling

them is usually a losing game of catch-up.

The case of taxes on the super-rich hedge fund man-

agers mentioned earlier is instructive. Well barricaded

by complex laws concerning taxation and partnerships,

hedge funds and their managers have operated in a non-

transparent realm that is, according to the Economic Pol-

icy Institute, “unregulated, or exempt from Securities and

Exchange Commission (SEC) regulation, under both the

Investment Advisor Act and the Investment Company

Act.” By having a large portion of the fruits of their

management service labor taxed at the 15 percent capital

gains rate rather than the 35 percent ordinary income

rate, hedge fund managers have been able to take home a

sum conservatively estimated to be $6.3 billion per year

in tax savings. Because of these arrangements, the top 25

hedge fund managers who collectively earned $14.25 bil-

lion in 2006 avoided paying an estimated $2 billion in

taxes, or an average of $80 million each.

65

Like scores of other similarly lucrative arrangements,

these tax beneﬁts have been in place for years and have

only recently emerged into public debate. Few ordinary

citizens know or comprehend the details. “Defending this

tax break are highly paid lobbyists such as Douglas Lowen-

stein and Grover Norquist, who loudly and repeatedly

make the claim that taxing hedge fund managers like every-

one else will harm the average working family.”

66

Even

after they were exposed in public, it was far from certain

that these tax loopholes would be closed. The Democratic

Senatorial Campaign Committee received $779,100 in

contributions in the month of June 2007 from private

equity ﬁrms and hedge funds. The initial response of Sen-

ator Charles Schumer (D-NY)—who as head of that com-

mittee was the architect of the Democrats’ 2006 senatorial

election victories, and who has consistently aided the pri-

vate equity interests whose contributions help keep him

in ofﬁce—was to block efforts to force hedge fund man-

agers to pay the same taxes everyone else must pay.

67

As of this writing (early in 2009), no serious move

had been made to tax hedge fund managers at the same

rates as other Americans. Whatever the outcome of this

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particular issue—which is crucial for only a few extremely

wealthy individuals and may not much concern the

wealthy as a group—it makes clear that solicitude toward

the rich can be found in more than one political party.

Electoral Impact

If small, wealthy minorities sometimes prevail through

lobbying, why do not ordinary voters rebel and throw out

the ofﬁcials who are responsible? It is helpful but not suf-

ﬁcient to give the classic answer associated with E.E.

Schattschneider: that lobbying victories often involve low-

visibility issues—monetary policy and many tax policies

surely qualify—on which the scope of conﬂict is narrow

and the public is not involved.

68

Why don’t political entre-

preneurs get the public involved, publicizing ofﬁcials’

betrayals and defeating them in elections? Any account of

oligarchy within a formally democratic political system

must grapple with the question of how oligarchs inﬂuence

elections.

Simple Downsian “median voter” models have con-

vinced many political scientists that—at least when poli-

tics are unidimensional—competition for votes in

two-party elections ensures democratic control of policy

making.

69

But such models a priori exclude the possibility

of inﬂuence by money or interest groups and maximize

the apparent power of ordinary voters, by making a series

of highly restrictive and quite implausible assumptions:

that all citizens or a random sample thereof turn out to

vote; that all citizens perceive candidates’ policy stands

correctly and vote purely on that basis; that candidates or

parties are pure vote seekers and don’t care about policy.

In the real world, turnout is skewed and is an important

variable that money and organization can affect. Percep-

tions are malleable, subject to media advertising that costs

a lot of money. Voting often turns on candidate images,

which are particularly subject to manipulation through

expensive advertising campaigns. Candidates and parties

(and the activists and money-givers who back and ani-

mate them) often care a great deal about policy.

For these reasons there is every reason to expect that

money affects electoral outcomes. The empirical evidence

conﬁrms this expectation. At least since Gary Jacobson’s

pioneering work, it has been clear that large sums of money

are generally necessary (though not sufﬁcient) for getting

elected to the House of Representatives, especially for chal-

lengers.

70

Senatorial and presidential elections are even

more expensive, so success there is probably all the more

dependent on raising money.

Enormous amounts of money are spent on US elections:

perhaps $4 billion in 2004, up about $1 billion from 2000.

71

Much campaign money has come from the wealthiest Amer-

icans, like the “Pioneers” who gave or bundled $100,000 or

more to George W. Bush’s campaign in 2004. In fact the

vast preponderance of money, some 80 percent of it, has

generally come from a small “donor class” constituting

roughly one-tenth of 1 percent of the population.

72

True,

the 2008 Obama campaign’s enormous success at Internet

fundraising may have tended to democratize campaign

money giving, but probably not as much as the imagery

suggests. For crucial early money the campaign relied heav-

ily on Wall Street, and big donors continued to be impor-

tant throughout. Even on the Internet, a great proportion

of money collected (as opposed to the more ballyhooed pro-

portion of contributors) reﬂected large contributions by the

wealthy.

73

The Robert Rubin/investment-banking ori-

ented Obama economic team (Summers, Geithner, and Fur-

man) was not very threatening to the rich.

Most big campaign donors want something from poli-

tics. And what they want may be closely related to the fact

of their wealth. Survey data based on national samples

have not found that contributors express much different

policy preferences than the average American does, but this

probably results from the focus of survey questions on

matters of politics as usual rather than on core concerns of

the wealthy, and from the prevalence of low-level donors in

surveys.

74

The divergence is surely much greater for the

wealthiest and most important contributors on the issues

they care most about. This is an important topic for research.

The biggest contributors may be able to insist upon

adherence to their positions on key issues as a condition

for contributing. Or—it amounts to the same thing—

parties and candidates may know what they have to advo-

cate in order to get the money. Adherence to key pro-

wealthy positions gains rather than loses votes for politicians

if the vote-producing impact of the money exceeds any

alienating effect that unpopular issue stands (if publicized

and known) would have upon voters. This is obviously

the case if both parties agree formally or informally to take

similar, pro-wealthy stands on certain key issues, but no

cartel may be necessary (that is, each party’s individual

incentives will do it), if money—with its effects on turn-

out, perceptions, and candidate images—can produce

enough votes.

75

Thus campaign contributions constitute

a plausible mechanism by which oligarchs could inﬂuence

public policy despite formally democratic institutions.

Still, some observers are skeptical about whether cam-

paign contributions actually gain policy results after elec-

tions are over. A particularly clever (though, we think,

wrong-headed) argument is McChesney’s: this is “money

for nothing”; politicians are not really inﬂuenced by con-

tributions but simply engage in extortion, extracting rents

by threatening to enact hostile policies.

76

More troubling

to our argument is the fact that efforts to pin down the

impact of PAC contributions on congressional roll call

voting behavior have often found that, controlling for a

member’s party and ideology, contributions have little

effect.

77

(Note, however, that PAC contributions consti-

tute only a very small part of the ﬂow of money into

politics, and that they tend to have a less conservative

[e.g., more pro-labor] tilt than the much greater “soft

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742 Perspectives on Politics

money” and “bundled” contributions that tend to come

from the wealthy.) But this ﬁnding—if correct—does not

imply that campaign money has no impact. It simply indi-

cates that any inﬂuence by money tends to work chieﬂy

by selecting (nominating and electing) ofﬁcials with ideo-

logically friendly stands, rather than by bribing ofﬁcials to

go against their own beliefs once in ofﬁce.

A promising line of thinking about this is Ferguson’s

(1995, ch.1) “investment theory” of political parties, which

rests on the assumption that both parties in a two-party

system require large amounts of cash in order to be viable

and that this need forces them to round up major inves-

tors, who in turn insist upon a measure of policy alle-

giance.

78

Politicians of the two parties could tacitly or

expressly agree not to compete over the issues of greatest

importance to the (in this respect) rather homogeneous

set of big money givers; or their individual calculations of

the vote-producing impact of money could lead to the

same results. Either way, voters may have no real choice:

the candidates presented to them may be carefully ﬁltered

and found acceptable by oligarchs.

79

Still, the conceivable danger of an outraged citizenry

turning to a third party (which, to be sure, would face

formidable legal barriers), or rioting and demonstrating,

suggests that secure oligarchical rule might also have to

involve a third pathway of inﬂuence; the shaping of pub-

lic opinion.

80

Opinion Shaping

There are good reasons to believe that—under certain con-

ditions and within certain limits—shrewdly invested money

can move public opinion in directions inimical to citizens’

interests. Despite what we consider a remarkable ability of

collective opinion to come to sensible conclusions when

the information environment communicates contending

views, under certain conditions even a “rational public”

can be fooled.

81

This is particularly likely to happen when

elite communications are monolithic, which might well

occur (for precisely the reasons noted in our discussion of

lobbying and electoral impact) on issues of central con-

cern to an oligarchy.

We know, from experimental and time series as well as

cross-sectional evidence, that the contents of the mass media

can affect both what people think about and how they

think about it. Citizens’ agendas are inﬂuenced, their deci-

sions are primed, their perceptions are affected, and their

collective policy preferences are moved by what is said on

television, print media, and (no doubt) the Internet.

82

This creates opportunities for vilifying candidates who

might threaten oligarchs, sowing distrust of government,

changing the subject (e.g., promoting “values” rather than

economic policies), and obfuscating the merits of propos-

als seen as dangerous.

One of the most important and best-replicated ﬁnd-

ings of media research is that ofﬁcial sources—especially

the US president and his administration—tend to domi-

nate political news in the mass media.

83

Most Americans,

most of the time, have to rely upon ofﬁcials—and on

ostensibly nonpartisan “experts” and commentators who

generally speak the same language—for facts and interpre-

tations about world and national politics.

84

To the extent

that ofﬁcials are selected or inﬂuenced through electoral

and lobbying activities by the wealthy, it is plausible that

public opinion is indirectly shaped by an oligarchy. More

directly, oligarchs could orchestrate information cam-

paigns through advertising and through friendly or subsi-

dized communicators.

Case studies have identiﬁed some of the speciﬁc mech-

anisms by which public opinion may be manipulated.

Jacobs and Shapiro, for example, show how “crafted talk”

by politicians (themselves likely inﬂuenced by special inter-

ests), and information campaigns by the interests them-

selves, can mislead citizens about what the politicians are

doing and about what sorts of policies would actually

beneﬁt the citizenry.

85

The painful case of misleading infor-

mation and incorrect public perceptions leading up to the

invasion of Iraq conﬁrms that ofﬁcials’ rhetoric can indeed

manipulate opinion—especially on foreign policies, which

are often complex, distant, and subject to centralized infor-

mation control by the executive.

86

We believe, however, that any opinion shaping on behalf

of a US oligarchy is more likely to operate in much a

much more slow, subtle, and hard-to-pin-down fashion,

involving long-term inﬂuences through the policy plan-

ning apparatus noted above (foundations, think tanks,

helpful scholars, and commentators); the increasingly con-

centrated and corporate-owned mass media, few of which

have much sympathy with egalitarian economic notions;

and the US education system.

87

It is very difﬁcult to gather

deﬁnitive evidence concerning the presence or absence of

such long-term persuasive effects, but it seems possible

that Americans’ apparent reluctance to seek any major

redistribution of wealth, and their pervasive distrust of

government, may reﬂect oligarchic inﬂuence on opin-

ion.

88

Anti-redistributive attitudes by ordinary citizens

could constitute a major element in a stable oligarchy-

mass settlement.

Constitutional Rules

In assessing possible mechanisms of oligarchic inﬂuence it

is important to bear in mind that the US Constitution—a

revered but hardly democratic document—has imposed

rules beyond the reach of simple majority control that

may substantially facilitate oligarchy.

89

The Founders made

sure that the Constitution protected private property in a

variety of ways. Article I, sec. 10 prohibits states from

printing inﬂationary paper money or impairing the obli-

gation of contract. The Article IV, sec. 4 guarantee of a

republican form of government would presumably pre-

vent any radical revolution in a state. Most important, the

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Fifth Amendment prohibits the federal government—and

now, through the Fourteenth Amendment, also state

governments—from depriving any person of property with-

out “due process of law” (a phrase interpreted to include

substantive protection) and from taking private property

without “just compensation.” Redistribution with full com-

pensation, of course, would not be redistribution at all.

The Constitution provides for an appointive judiciary

that has consistently interpreted and enforced constitu-

tional and statutory law in ways that protect wealth. Indeed

it can be argued that one of the chief missions of the

Court through most of its history has been to further and

protect the private acquisition of wealth.

90

Appointment

of acceptable Supreme Court justices and lower court

judges, then, may be one key to the exertion of oligarchic

inﬂuence over key, property-related issues. The US Senate

plays a special part in the appointment of judges—as it

does in foreign policy—as well as playing a role coequal

with the House in ordinary legislation. Even after the

demise of the original constitutional system for appoint-

ing rather than electing senators, the peculiar, state-based

apportionment of the Senate and its small number of mem-

bers have ensured that it poorly represents the US popu-

lation as a whole. (Relative to Californians, each resident

of Wyoming is overrepresented by a factor of about 70 to

1, for example.)

91

Senate elections, including those in small

states that can be inundated with outside cash, appear to

be particularly money-driven. They often result in victo-

ries by multi-millionaire candidates (or candidates backed

by multi-millionaires), who are likely—consciously or

not—to have special sympathy for the views of the wealth-

iest Americans. Perhaps most important, the Constitution’s

fundamental arrangements of federalism and separation

of powers provide multiple veto points at which any seri-

ous threat to an oligarchy-friendly status quo can be

blocked.

Conclusion

Some excellent research has been done on political inequal-

ity in the United States. We believe it is now appropriate

to move a step further and think about the possibility of

extreme political inequality, involving great political inﬂu-

ence by a very small number of extremely wealthy indi-

viduals. We argue that it is useful to think about the US

political system in terms of oligarchy.

The oligarchy approach suggests many important ques-

tions for future research. Does material wealth translate

into political power, on a one-to-one (or some other) basis?

Does an identiﬁable oligarchy exist in the United States?

If so, who are the members? Do networks among oli-

garchs matter, or just common interests? What speciﬁc

areas of public policy do they dominate? How, precisely,

do they exert inﬂuence? What are the relative contribu-

tions of lobbying, electoral impact, opinion shaping, or

other pathways of inﬂuence? How does the United States

compare with other countries, including those of Western

Europe? We have sketched, but only sketched, possible

answers to some of these questions. Much more investi-

gation is needed.

We have mainly dealt with empirical issues. If an oli-

garchy exists in the United States, what are the normative

implications? To what extent might oligarchs, ruling in

their own interest, incidentally beneﬁt many others? Alex-

ander Hamilton’s schemes for an “extensive commercial

republic” (laying the foundations for capitalism and eco-

nomic development) suggest a benign answer (Hamilton,

Madison and Jay 1961 [1787–88], paper #11.) On the

other hand, do oligarchs sometimes push public policy in

directions harmful to most citizens? Which policies, to

what extent, and how? These questions are profoundly

important for understanding possible limits to democracy

in America. We believe that answering them ought to be a

central concern for students of American politics.

Notes

1 Aristotle 1996, IV, viii.

2 Michels 1999.

3 Jacobs and Skocpol 2005; Bartels 2008; [see the

symposium in the March 2009 issue of Perspectives

on Politics]; Page and Jacobs 2009.

4 Aristotle writes, “whether in oligarchies or in democ-

racies, the number of the governing body, whether

the greater number, as in a democracy, or the smaller

number, as in an oligarchy, is an accident due to the

fact that the rich everywhere are few, and the poor

numerous” (Aristotle 1996, III viii 1279b, 35–39).

Important writings on oligarchy and elite rule in-

clude Mosca 1939, Michels 1915, Pareto 1935,

Bottomore 1964, and Mills 1999. Leach 2005

presents a sophisticated discussion of oligarchy. For a

skeptical view see Payne 1968. Other critiques in-

clude Dahl 1958, Rustow 1966, and Cammack

1990. We cannot cite all the relevant literature; one

of us (Winters) has collected more than one thou-

sand books and articles bearing on oligarchy. Leach

2005 is an excellent entry point.

5 A plutocracy is an oligarchy of the wealthy, which to

Aristotle and to us is a redundancy. Femia 2006

provides the best overview and critique of Mosca

and especially Pareto. He shows that Pareto’s optic

was based much more on the psychological origins

of political processes than on material consider-

ations. Indeed, Femia notes (114) that Pareto juxta-

poses materially-based power and exploitation with

all other forms of exploitation based on race, ethnic-

ity, religion and gender. We view materially-based

power (and politics) as analytically distinct from

these other forms.

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744 Perspectives on Politics

6 We adapt the power resource approach developed by

Korpi 1985.

7 Korpi 1985 and Isaac 1987 provide important sum-

maries and critiques of the faces-of-power debate.

Key contributions to that debate include Bachrach

and Baratz 1962 and Lukes 1974.

8 Dahl 1967.

9 Connolly 1969.

10 On this and related points we are indebted to Jeffrey

Isaac.

11 See Przeworski 1991.

12 Higley and Burton 2006.

13 Olson 1965, 22, 49–50.

14 Renegades (rich individuals who favor extensive

redistribution of wealth) do of course exist. One

should not be too hasty in identifying them, how-

ever. In our view, neither Franklin Roosevelt (argu-

ably the savior of capitalism in the United States)

nor George Soros (a prodigious contributor to Dem-

ocrats in the 2004 election, motivated chieﬂy by

concerns over the rule of law and US standing in the

world), ﬁts the description. In a conversation with

one of the present authors (Page) at a 2003 APSA

event concerning “Democracy and Inequality,” Soros

noted that it would be odd if someone like him,

who had proﬁted so greatly from the US system,

were deeply outraged about economic inequality.

15 Dew-Becker and Gordon 2005 show that between

1966 and 2001, real wage and salary income growth

in the US for the bottom 90 percent of earners did

not keep pace with productivity growth. Average

(mean) wage and salary income for the whole popu-

lation only kept up with productivity growth be-

cause fully half of all income gains accrued to the

top 10 percent. With particular relevance to oligar-

chy, “increasing inequality within the top decile was

as important a source of growing inequality as the

gap between the top and bottom deciles” (67, em-

phasis original). US Department of Labor data show

that since 2001 incomes have lagged behind produc-

tivity even more spectacularly. According to Head

2007, “between 1995 and 2006, the growth of

employee productivity exceeded the growth of em-

ployee real wages by 340 percent. Between 2001 and

2006, the ﬁrst six years of George W. Bush’s presi-

dency, the gap widened alarmingly to 779 per-

cent”(42). See also Johnston 2003; Katz and Autor

1999.

16 Because of their reliance on tax data, the unit of

analysis for Piketty and Saez is actual or potential

“tax units”—those who ﬁle (or potentially would

ﬁle) income tax returns singly or jointly.

17 Johnston 2007. See Piketty and Saez 2003 and

the updates at http://elsa.berkeley.edu/;saez/

TabFig2005prel.xls.

18 Economic Policy Institute 2006; Mishel, Bernstein,

and Allegretto 2006.

19 Top 25 Moneymakers 2007.

20 Alpha magazine, as reported at Bloomberg.com,

5/08.

21 We certainly do not claim that material resources

translate into political power on an exactly linear,

one-to-one basis; we consider the precise terms of

translation to be an important matter for empirical

investigation. There may be a linear coefﬁcient of

translation of either less or more than 1.0; or the

translation function may be nonlinear. The power

indices we introduce below can easily be adjusted to

different translation functions. We believe that any

plausible function will yield highly concentrated

material-based political power among top income

earners and wealth holders.

22 An individual’s Material Power Index is one compo-

nent of the overall power proﬁle just mentioned.

One could imagine similar indices based on mobili-

zational power, coercive power, or the power derived

from holding ofﬁce, which might be combined in

various ways into a comprehensive index of political

power. This, too, is a major topic for empirical

investigation.

23 E.g., Verba, Schlozman and Brady 1995.

24 McEachern 1975; Pfeffer and Salancik 1978; Salan-

cik and Pfeffer 1980.

25 Wolff 2007, 5, 11, 15. See also Wolff 2002.

26 Wolff 2007, 17.

27 Wolff 2007, 11, 15.

28 The term “individual” is used here to contrast with

“group” indices of power. As we make clear, how-

ever, the SCF data on wealth use households as

units, whereas the estate tax method and the Forbes

list refer to individuals. The apparent differences in

wealth distribution when different units are consid-

ered, which we note in the text, do not much affect

the main point of extreme wealth concentration at

the top.

29 Kopczuk and Saez 2004a.

30 Ibid., 479–83, esp. 481.

31 Erikson, MacKuen, and Stimson 2002; Page and

Shapiro 1983. Page and Shapiro, however, acknowl-

edged several reasons to be cautious about any con-

clusion that democratic responsiveness pervades

American politics (189).

32 Page and Shapiro 1983, 179, found that public

policy moved in the opposite direction from public

opinion in 34 percent of the 231 cases studied in

which both policy and collective preferences

changed. Considering all their 357 cases of opinion

change (including the 120 in which policy did not

change at all), policy moved in a congruent direc-

tion within one year only 43 percent of the time,

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hardly a sign of perfectly functioning populistic

democracy.

33 See Domhoff 2002.

34 Bartels 2005, 2008.

35 Gilens 2005.

36 Jacobs and Page 2005.

37 Page with Bouton 2006, 210.

38 Jacobs and Skocpol 2005; American Political Science

Association 2004.

39 See Block 1977; Stiglitz and Charlton 2005.

40 Page with Bouton 2006, 213.

41 Ferguson 1995.

42 Hamilton, Madison, and Jay 1961, #10.

43 Ferguson 1995, ch. 3.

44 See Greider 1987.

45 Reuters 2009; Johnson 2009; Ferguson and Johnson

2009a, 2009b.

46 Brownlee 1996.

47 Johnston 2003; see Pechman and Okner 1974.

48 2005 CPS.

49 US Census Bureau 2007, 2, 6.

50 Reynolds and Smolensky 1977; Wolff and Zacharias

2006; Page 1983, 135–145. Page reviews the early

economic studies and concludes that US govern-

ment activity had little or no net effect on the distri-

bution of income, particularly if public goods

spending (e.g. military spending) is allocated across

households in proportion to income rather than

equally. Wolff and Zacharias 2006 ﬁnd substantial

equalizing effects from transfer spending (especially

Social Security and Medicare) and some effects from

public consumption (especially education and

health), but none at all from taxation, because of the

regressive effects of payroll, property, and consump-

tion taxes. Again the net effects are moderate.

51 See Domhoff 2006, ch. 4–7. The analysis of policy

planning, opinion shaping, candidate selection, and

special interest activities by a “power elite” (“the lead-

ership group for a dominant social class consisting of

the owners and managers of large income-producing

properties”) is very useful for our argument, though

the concept of oligarchy is distinct from that of

power elite. Similarly useful are Dye 2002 and Block’s

2007 “neo-Polanyian” analysis.

52 See Truman 1971, chs. XI–XV; Berry and Wilcox

2007.

53 Continetti 2006.

54 Schlozman and Tierney 1986, 70; Schlozman and

Burch 2009. Schlozman and Tierney found that, of

all lobbying and interest groups with Washington

ofﬁces, 71 percent were business groups, including

corporations and trade associations, and 17 percent

were professional associations. Only 4 percent were

labor unions, and far fewer represented women, the

handicapped, senior citizens, or other major popula-

tion groups. Since 1981 there has been a big in-

crease in the representation of sub-national

governments and institutions like universities and

hospitals, but not of organizations seeking public

goods or representing the economically disadvan-

taged. In 2001 corporations, trade and other busi-

ness associations, and business occupational

associations still constituted 55 percent of all the

organizations represented in Washington, and

unions constituted just 1 percent (Kay Lehman

Schlozman, personal communication, 7/7/07; see

Schlozman and Burch 2009, table 2).

55 See Goldﬁeld 1987.

56 Olson 1965; Truman 1971.

57 Domhoff 2006, ch. 4; Peschek 1987; Dye 2002.

58 Lindblom 1977, ch. 13; Lindblom 1982; Lindblom

and Woodhouse 1993.

59 Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo and Snyder 2003;

Jacobs and Skocpol 2005, 115–117.

60 In a time series analysis, Smith 2000 regressed the

proportion of times per year that the US Chamber

of Commerce’s position prevailed in legislative deci-

sions, on various explanatory factors. He found that

business succeeded most often following a more

conservative public “mood” and when there were

more Republicans in Congress. But the study did

not provide an estimate of the over-all frequency of

business success or the extent of business’s causal

impact. It dealt only with contested issues on the

public agenda, not issues on which an oligarchy may

have won widespread consent. The substantial coef-

ﬁcient for public mood may signal earlier opinion

shaping by business (cf. ch. 8). And an oligarchy

might work partly through inﬂuence on the partisan

balance. For these reasons, Smith’s analysis by no

means rules out either extensive political inﬂuence

by business or the possibility of oligarchy.

Several economists and others have used events analy-

sis of equity portfolios to estimate the value to busi-

nesses of political connections, which is often found to

be quite substantial: Fisman 2001, Faccio 2006, Jay-

achandran 2006, Ferguson and Voth 2008. Most

of these ﬁndings imply political inﬂuence by busi-

ness, though they do not conclusively demonstrate it.

61 E.g., see Drew (1999, ch. 4) and her earlier work;

Graetz and Shapiro 2005.

62 Ferguson 1995, ch. 2; Swenson 2002, ch. 9, 10;

Domhoff 1990; Berkowitz and McQuaid 1988.

63 Ferguson and Rogers 1986.

64 Johnston 2003.

65 “Only because hedge funds and private equity ﬁrms

are organized as limited liability partnerships—

which are already treated favorably for tax and liabil-

ity purposes—are these same professional services

taxed differently. The result is a distortion in the

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746 Perspectives on Politics

compensation and after-tax income between these

super-rich hedge fund managers and millions of

others in the workforce”; Dodd 2007.

66 Ibid.

67 Donmoyer and Goldman 2007 write that“the ﬁght

over taxation of buyout ﬁrms and hedge funds isn’t

the ﬁrst time Schumer has gone to bat for New

York-based companies that are among his top do-

nors. In 2000, Schumer was among several dozen

lawmakers who wrote letters to then-Securities and

Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt

questioning a proposed SEC rule that would bar

accounting ﬁrms from providing consulting services

to companies they audit. That practice was restruc-

tured two years later as part of the overhaul of ac-

counting industry laws after the collapse of Enron

Corp. Two of Schumer’s leading contributors from

1995 to 2000 were top accounting ﬁrms, according

to the Center for Responsive Politics.”

68 Schattschneider 1960, ch. I, II; see also McConnell

1966, ch. 4.

69 Hotelling 1929; Downs 1957, ch. 8.

70 Jacobson 1978; see Jacobs and Skocpol 2005,

113–115.

71 Accessed July 25, 2007 ^http://www.msnbc.msn.

com/id/6388580&, November 2, 2004, citing the

Center for Responsive Politics. On the “wealth

primary” and campaign ﬁnance reform see Raskin

and Bonifaz 1993, 1994, and Raskin 1997. On the

“donor class” see Overton 2002, 2004.

72 Johnston 2003.

73 Simpson and Farnam 2008; Luo and Drew 2008.

74 Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995, 211.

75 A telling critique of median voter models is Ferguson

1995, appendix (“Deduced and Abandoned”), 383,

which notes that so long as campaigns are costly, the

generic policy interests of all large investors diverge

from those of ordinary people, and pooling of resources

would confront high transaction costs or other obsta-

cles, “voters are checkmated” without collusion or

conspiracy of any kind.

76 McChesney 1997.

77 Ansolabehere, de Figueiredo and Snyder 2003.

78 Ferguson 1995, ch. 1.

79 Of course there are exceptions. Candidates for the

Presidency, the Senate (full of multi-millionaires),

House leadership, and the Supreme Court may be

most susceptible to ﬁltering for acceptability to an

oligarchy. Success with just one of those institutions

would be sufﬁcient to block any dangerous,

oligarchy-threatening legislation.

80 See Domhoff 2002 and 2006, ch. 5.

81 Page and Shapiro 1992, ch. 9 and 394–97.

82 Iyengar and Kinder 1987; Page, Shapiro, and

Dempsey 1987.

83 Sigal 1973; Gans 1979; Hallin 1986; Bennett 1990;

Entman 2004; Bennett, Lawrence, and Livingston

2007.

84 Page, Shapiro, and Dempsey 1987 found that

experts and commentators, as well as popular

presidents, have the biggest effects on collective

policy preferences. See also Page and Shapiro 1992,

ch. 8.

85 Jacobs and Shapiro 2000; see also West and Loomis

1998, and the striking 2005 analysis by Graetz and

Shapiro of efforts to change the “climate of opinion”

about the estate tax.

86 Rich 2006; Kull, Ramsay, and Lewis 2003–2004.

87 Bagdikian 2004.

88 Hochschild 1981; Ladd and Bowman 1998; but see

Page and Jacobs 2009.

89 Dahl 2003.

90 See McCloskey 1960.

91 Dahl 2003, 48–50.

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Who we are: Voter participation, rationality and the 1999 election

November 1999 · Politikon South African Journal of Political Studies

Steven Eli Friedman

This article suggests that voting behaviour during the 1999 South African election refutes the claim (derived from rational choice theory, but common among South African elites) that voters base their decisions on whether or not to cast a ballot on mainly instrumental criteria. Rather, the election revealed a high degree of enthusiasm for democratic participation as an intrinsic value. The ... [Show full abstract] article argues that this has important implications for governance strategy, providing a critique of the prevalent assumption that democratic strengthening will depend largely on enhanced material ‘delivery’ rather than on broadening and deepening democracy.

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The neo‐functionalist explanation of world wars: A critique and an alternative

August 1993 · International Interactions

In this article we criticize explanations ofworldwar at the level of the international system: the hegemony‐stability theory developed by Gilpin and the world leadership model developed by Modelski and Thompson. In our view, (a) their statements are of a definitional nature instead of being empirically refutable propositions, (b) their statement that global war periods are more severe than ... [Show full abstract] hegemonic intervals is empirically incorrect, and (c) their conviction that global wars are functional, unjustifiably neglects the possibility that world wars are mere senseless slaughters. As an alternative explanation of the outbreak of world wars we propose a three‐level approach, starting with the war‐instigating effect of power transitions in dyads of major powers. Wars in dyads of contending nations are specifically prone to escalate during periods of capability deconcentration at the systemic level. In addition, the rise of democracy and the trading‐state may signal the abolition of a strategy of ‘conquest’ to attain leadership positions: even in periods of systemic deconcentration, power transitions only escalate to world war if one major power has an authoritarian or totalitarian political system and an autarchic economic policy.

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Le Maroc à la lumière de l'enjeu démocratique

Karim Boujrada

Cette étude part du constat que la référence à la Démocratie s'est multipliée au Maroc depuis le début des années 1990 tant du côté des autorités que des contestataires et critiques du régime marocain. Elle vise à évaluer le régime politique marocain à la lumière de la Démocratie entendue comme système politique fondé à la fois sur des valeurs et des institutions. Ce travail vise donc à éclairer ... [Show full abstract] ce qui dans les réalités du passé et dans les tendances et orientations actuelles du régime politique et de la société marocaine constituent des facteurs favorables ou défavorables à la démocratisation du régime politique marocain. Cette étude se base sur une conception ouverte de la Démocratie qui est d'abord fondée sur des valeurs et des principes. Ce travail se fonde aussi sur le postulat que la forme politique de l'État-nation moderne possède des exigences particulières en matière de Démocratie. Autrement dit, pour être effectifs, les valeurs et principes de la Démocratie doivent trouver une traduction institutionnelle minimale. À partir de cette définition, seront successivement examinées la constitution et les principales institutions politiques du Maroc, l'économie et les relations internationales du Royaume alaouite ainsi que la société et les cultures marocaines. Les conclusions tirées sont que les maigres avancées réalisées en matière de Démocratie sont contrecarrées par une Monarchie et une oligarchie marocaines peu désireuses d'approfondir la démocratisation du régime et de la société. L'insertion et l'institutionnalisation de l'opposition partisane « historique » au régime auront consacré la cooptation de ces derniers. Enfin, la fragmentation idéologique des opposants entre gauchistes laïcisants et islamistes empêche la mise en place d'un réel pouvoir d'opposition et de revendication face au régime. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Démocratie, Démocratisation, Valeurs, Institutions, Makhzen.

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The Liberal Peacebuilding Framework, Electoral Democracy and Reconciliation: The Cases of Mozambique...

January 2015

Directly after violent conflict, states have the difficult task of rebuilding and reconciling the nation. Central to this process seems to be holding democratic elections, but election periods in many African states are often accompanied by the fear of renewed violence. Instead of offering a positive step towards reconciliation, elections instead seem to reignite divisions and conflict. This ... [Show full abstract] chapter examines the election periods in Zimbabwe and Mozambique in terms of what these periods mean for local communities that are trying to deal with their violent past and move towards reconciliation. Drawing from the literature that critiques the liberal democratic framework, which arguably defines democracy primarily as electoral democracy, this chapter explores the impact of elections on reconciliation at the community level. It explores whether alternatives to the electoral framework are possible, particularly in the transitional phases of the post-conflict peace building period.