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Book Reviews: Politics in The Face of Financial Crisis
This book is already being hailed as a landmark study of American political representation. It is a pleasure to report that, for once, the professional chorus sings mostly on key. Martin Gilens' main empirical findings add up to a counterpart in political science of the famous Michelson-Morley experiment in physics. They knock into a cocked hat a whole generation of claims about the decisive role of public opinion and the "median voter" in the formation of public policy. If Gilens' results are taken as seriously as they deserve, they should kill off "normal science" as many of us have practiced it.
The author builds his case by a careful and imaginative analysis of almost two thousand survey questions asked by different national polls between 1981 and 2002, along with others from 1964 to 1969 and 2005 to 2006. His guiding idea is simple, though its execution bristles with methodological and statistical difficulties: begin by focusing on questions that ask respondents whether they support, oppose, or "don't know" about "some proposed change" in specific public policies. Then, see how many of these proposals actually became policy within four years. The resulting array of opinions and policy outcomes is then analyzed by several methods, virtually all involving some form of logistic regression. The final outcome is a series of tables and graphs estimating how the probability of actual policy changes varies as support for them changes across the public as a whole and among subgroups defined in various ways, but especially by levels of income.
Gilens waves an abundance of yellow flags about methods and measurement problems. But in the end, he does not mince words. He shows that "higher-income respondents' views are more strongly related to government policy." In fact, "the strength of the relationship between preferences and policy outcomes not only increases with each step up the income ladder but does so at an increasing rate" (pp. 76-77).
The Michelson-Morley result emerges from the author's scrutiny of cases in which citizens at different levels of income disagree about preferred policies: "When preferences between the well-off and the poor diverge, government policy bears absolutely no...