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The Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise of American Democracy . By Kay Lehman Schlozman , Sidney Verba , and Henry E. Brady . Princeton : Princeton University Press , 2012. 728p. $35.00, $27.95 paper.
Book Reviews: American Politics
This is a weighty volume in many ways. In the most important sense, it takes big steps toward answering a central question of political science: How democratic is the American version of democracy? To the authors of The Unheavenly Chorus, democracy requires more than the free expression of political voice, or the opportunity to make one's views heard. They argue that equal political voice is vital. Decision makers need to hear the reactions of a chorus of voices that fairly represents the citizenry as a whole, and they need to be motivated to respond to a representative chorus. It is not easy to envision how we would determine the exact makeup of that truly representative chorus. But Kay Lehman Schlozman, Sidney Verba, and Henry E. Brady make a compelling case that American politics diverges substantially from it. The louder voices belong to those who are able to go beyond the use of the vote--a powerful but inarticulate form of communication--to make more explicit statements to public officials about their preferences. The louder individual voices, the authors show, systematically overrepresent wealthier and better-educated Americans. The louder voices among organized groups are those of business.
The distortion of representation in favor of voices with upper socioeconomic status is not a new finding, of course. E. E. Schattschneider's contention that the "flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent" (The Semi-Sovereign People, 1960, p. 35) must be one of the most widely repeated statements in political science. Several other first-rate works have also recently examined inequality in the American political...