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Martin Gilens , Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (Princeton : Princeton University Press , 2012, $35.00/£24.95). Pp. 348. ISBN 978 0 691 15397 1 .
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Growing economic inequalities in the United States have proved to be an inexhaustible source of fodder for pundits and public intellectuals. In this timely and important new book, Martin Gilens presents new metrics for weighing the impact of economic inequality on policy outcomes. In the process, Gilens introduces a good deal of clarity into public and scholarly conversation on inequality in the US.
This is not a study of racial, sexual, or other forms of inequality. Instead, Gilens focusses his attention exclusively on the preferences of citizens of different income levels and the association between these preferences and policy outcomes. To gauge public preferences, he aggregated questions from a range of surveys posing specific policy changes to respondents (57). He then assessed whether or not these policy measures were enacted within four years of the date of the survey question (60).
Gilens's study yields some very noteworthy...