Among the many firsts of the Donald J. Trump presidency is the fact that Americans now have their first billionaire head of state, buttressed by one of the wealthiest cabinets in modern U.S. history. Are we entering an era of government of billionaires, by billionaires, and for billionaires? And if so, what are the implications for American democracy?
A growing body of research seeks to answer these questions, and Benjamin Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew Lacombe offer an important and lively addition to that work with Billionaires and Stealth Politics. Before we can understand the influence that wealthy Americans might have on governmental decisions, however, we need to know what the affluent want—and that is no easy task, as the authors explain. Unlike with the mass public, researchers cannot rely on traditional sample survey methods to capture the political views of the very wealthy. Page and Seawright, together with Larry Bartels, have previously made important strides by studying a representative sample of multimillionaires in the Chicagoland area. But even that heroic effort could not reach the more rarefied set of billionaires. And yet given the immense economic gains that U.S. billionaires have enjoyed, as well as recent journalistic accounts of their political activities, we have good reason to think that these mega-elites might command outsized political influence, above and beyond that of mere millionaires.
Page, Seawright, and Lacombe thus propose an alternative approach to documenting the views of the 100 wealthiest billionaires in the United States. They first systematically scoured the internet for public statements uttered by these individuals related to two contentious economic issues (taxation and Social Security) and three social issues (immigration, abortion, and gay marriage). The authors then compared the content and frequency of these pronouncements with political actions taken by their subjects, including making disclosed federal campaign contributions to issue-specific political action committees, working as bundlers of campaign donations, and serving on boards or advisory panels for policy-focused advocacy groups. At each step the authors describe their methods, including strengths and limits, in refreshingly frank and accessible prose.
Setting aside the prominent exceptions of individuals like Tom Steyer, Sheldon Adelson, or Charles and David Koch, the authors summarize their conclusion as follows: “most of the wealthiest US billionaires say little or nothing in public, over an extended period of time, about the specifics of major policy issues” (p. 130). This silence, the authors point out, is especially resounding when the concrete political actions pursued by billionaires run up against public opinion, as with Social Security and tax policy. Despite the fact that many wealthy individuals spend much time and money on efforts to privatize or retrench Social Security and cut taxes, those individuals rarely reveal their views in public. Why risk public backlash when these individuals can operate behind the scenes, deploying “stealth politics” instead?
The authors complement the summaries of their extensive web-scraping efforts with a series of colorful case studies chosen to validate their coding: these studies include some prominent billionaires likely to be well known to readers (Warren Buffett and David Koch) and others who are less so (John Menard Jr.). In addition to providing helpful context, the vignettes also suggest the specific mechanisms through which billionaires might affect U.S. politics. We learn, for instance, about how Menard, the founder and owner of a large Midwestern home improvement chain, made very large and early contributions to conservative Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s election campaigns. We also hear about how Menard has used his control of a large retail business to promote conservative causes and Republican candidates to his many employees, for instance, by tacitly requiring rank-and-file workers to take at-home civics courses that boost the free market and attack taxes and regulations. Both actions suggest important vehicles for the political influence of the wealthy: in low-salience domains of state politics and in the control of private-sector businesses where they can use employees as a political resource.
In one of their most intriguing contributions, Page, Seawright, and Lacombe consider how conservative billionaires might use the federated structure of U.S. government to engage in “boundary control,” stymieing governmental action at the federal level while promoting one-party Republican control in the states. This chapter thus begins to move away from describing the preferences of the wealthy to considering how the wealthy might use particular political institutions to advance their policy objectives. Joining a long line of work stretching back to E. E. Schattschneider and Grant McConnell, their findings stress just how susceptible state and local governments are to capture by well-organized elite interests.
It is a testament to the wealth of fascinating descriptive analysis offered by the authors that readers are likely to end each chapter with ideas of how to apply the findings and concepts to new questions. I briefly sketch out three directions for future research hinted at in Billionaires and Stealth Politics that deserve more attention.
First, given the focus of the book on the preferences of billionaires, it is natural that the authors have taken an individual-level perspective on their research subjects. But what stands out from the authors’ qualitative case studies is just how central political organizations are to the influence exercised by billionaires (emphasis in the original). More attention needs to be paid to the organizations—their structure, tactics, and consequences—in which the billionaires are investing. In ongoing work with Theda Skocpol, I have focused on a subset of elite-funded groups: donor consortiums. But much more work remains to be done to consider how and why wealthy individuals decide to invest in various efforts instead of others; it is especially important to consider donations other than election-time giving, which represents only a small fraction of the money invested by billionaires and millionaires in nonprofits and support groups.
In addition to focusing on political organizations, more remains to be learned about the relationship between ultrawealthy individuals and the businesses they may own or direct. In Billionaires and Stealth Politics, the authors tend to assume a more or less direct connection between the corporate sources of billionaires’ wealth and their political interests. In some cases, this elision makes sense, as with Menard (with his retail empire) or Robert Rowling (a hotel, gym, and extractive resource baron). Both men have sought deregulatory policies that would directly benefit their corporate bottom lines. But in other prominent cases the picture is more muddled. Understanding the intersection of personal ideological outlooks, corporate interests, and political advocacy would be a very helpful next step in the study of wealthy Americans’ political entanglements.
Finally, the authors hint at tactics through which wealthy Americans might be able to exploit political institutions to carry out their policy objectives against the wishes of the public, especially through federalism. It would be fascinating, however, to expand on the boundary control theory to explain how billionaires and wealthy donors can use campaign contributions not only to support one-party governments but also to directly shape policy outcomes. Similar analyses could be done to assess billionaires’ strategies for achieving political change in other venues, such as through the parties, the judiciary, and the regulatory state.
Given how little we know about these broader questions, it is clear just how valuable a contribution Billionaires and Stealth Politics makes to our understanding of American plutocrats in an era of high and rising economic inequality. The book thus merits reading by anyone interested in issues of inequality, representation, and power—and anyone concerned about the threat these wealthy individuals may pose to our democracy.
