According to the APSA report, “American Democracy in an Age of
Rising Inequality,” in the United States economic and political
inequality are feeding on each another. Since the 1970s, earnings,
income, and wealth have become more unequal, while politics is becoming
more elitist. Rising inequality is corrupting our democracy, especially
through the rising role that money plays in politics. At the same time
a more exclusive government exacerbates, or at least tolerates, growing
inequality.
Changes toward greater material inequality are easy to exaggerate.
For the most part, they reflect the rich getting richer rather than
other people doing worse. Trends slowed in the 1990s, when income gains
were broad based. The causes are not well understood and have little
tie to government.1
Nor is it clear
that rising economic inequality has heightened political inequality.
The report does not assert this. While active participants in politics
are skewed toward the elite, they differ from nonparticipants much more
in their demographics than in their political views.
2 To my eye, recent changes in elite politics have
not clearly made the government any less responsive to society than it
was decades ago.
Silence from Below
The important change, rather, is outside the Beltway. Elites may not
be misrepresenting the masses, but the people seem to demand less from
government than they once did. In part, they participate less. Since
1960, voting turnout has fallen, especially among lower-income people,
and unionism and other organizing by the less privileged have ebbed.
And in part, people make fewer new demands than formerly. No popular
movement has arisen to challenge inegalitarian trends. Ordinary
Americans are less likely to insist that government do more to
facilitate their lives. The elderly recently obtained a Medicare drug
benefit from Congress, but that was the exception.
Not every policy change stems from public passivity. Some recent cuts
in antipoverty spending reflect evidence that programs were
ineffective. Some cuts in Social Security and Medicare were forced by
exploding costs not faced in earlier eras. Reduced public demand comes
out, rather, in the Reagan and Bush tax cuts and the failure to enact
new social benefits, such as universal health care, that exist in other
rich countries.3
Why have public pressures abated? The report raises this question but
fails to answer it, instead preferring to moralize about the change and
blame it on the system. This aristocratic stance, where all
responsibility rests with the elite, contradicts the democratic values
that the authors claim to serve.
Is Inequality to Blame?
In part, the authors attribute falling engagement to inequality
itself. They stress that people who do not participate typically have
fewer resources, such as education and income, than those who do. To
say, however, that this explains lower participation goes too far. Only
in giving money to politicians is income or wealth decisive. Every
other form of participation depends partly on education and income but
even more on civic skills, the proclivity to be politically engaged,
recruitment by other people, and interest in the issues.4
Unless we say that all these attributes are
set by income and schooling, we have not explained much. If they cared
to do so, lower-income Americans could still command far more political
attention than they do.
Furthermore, to say that engagement is deterred by collective action
problems is no answer. Perhaps no single individual can influence
public outcomes enough to make political effort seem rational, yet
those who do participate feel amply rewarded, if only because they
satisfy civic values.5
So
the failure of the masses to make more input
seems
self-defeating. Indeed, it threatens a key premise of popular
government. As Derek Bok says, “Democracy assumes that
individuals will take advantage of the opportunities the system
provides to defend their interests. The experience of American workers
shows that this assumption may be unwarranted.”
6Failures of Government?
The report also blames popular disengagement on government. Faced
with growing inequality, supposedly, ordinary Americans can
“become increasingly discouraged about the effectiveness of
democratic governance, spreading cynicism and withdrawal from elections
and other arenas of public life.”7
It is true that since the 1960s rising proportions of respondents have
professed inefficacy or distrust of government in the National Election
Studies. But this sentiment cannot be taken at face value. Although voting
turnout has fallen, other forms of participation have not, and
alienation from government is not clearly tied to lower
participation.
8 The report also endorses research arguing that public policies can
shape participation through “policy feedback.” Allegedly,
broad programs that confer generous benefits, such as the GI Bill or
Social Security, promote more political engagement than recent, more
meager social programs.9
I am not persuaded
by the principal studies that find this, because they do not control
for selection effects.
10 Soss 1999; Mettler 2002.
In models of participation, the problem is that people with certain
features are likely to enroll in certain social programs and also to
participate or not participate in politics. The correlation between
enrollment and participation levels may thus be spurious. The solution
is 2SLS estimation using instrument variables to identify the true
program effect. Neither of these studies attempts this.
The
effects they find are, in any event, too small to explain the great
passivity.
Successes of Government
A better explanation for political withdrawal is the very success of
government in promoting expanded opportunity in recent decades. In the
past, ability was distributed far more equally than income or
opportunity. When individuals with brains and energy were denied fair
opportunity, they were receptive to egalitarian public policies. But
after the 1960s, chances to get ahead became more equal, detaching the
fortunes of children somewhat from those of their parents.11
Now able individuals of any background more often
receive decent schooling and make rewarding careers for themselves.
Affirmative action has eagerly sought out gifted minority individuals
to promote into the elite. The new meritocrats then become the
beneficiaries of inequality rather than its opponents. Equally, those
who lose out in fairer competition are less likely to assert
egalitarian claims. Thus, meritocracy can become the enemy of more
thoroughgoing social reform.
12 At the other end of society, the poor have become politically weaker.
Formerly, people with low income might simply have low-paying jobs, but
they retained the ability to join unions and parties seeking
egalitarian change; such workers were the core supporters of the New
Deal. But today the vast majority of steady workers, at any wage, are
above poverty. The remaining poor tend to have problems besides low
earnings—especially, single-parent families and an inability to
work consistently. Those patterns—not clearly due to the economy
or government—deter participation in either the workplace or
politics.13
The nation's prosperity also calms popular unrest. Ordinary
Americans, as the report notes, care a lot less about economic
inequality than they do about equal opportunity. Most people ignore the
rich, provided that they have a fair chance to get ahead themselves. It
was not inequality as such but distress and especially high
unemployment that sparked the aggressive movements of the populist era
and the 1930s. But the nation has enjoyed more secure employment
recently—only the recession of the early 1980s recalled the
severities of the Great Depression.
The report assumes that economic inequality should inspire
discontent, but the opposite is true. America's low wages promote
far greater job creation than in Europe, where labor markets are more
highly taxed and regulated. In Europe, earnings may be more equal, but
fewer people can get jobs at all. Americans complain about low pay, but
as long as they are working they are unlikely to march on Washington.
In the United States, easy employment is the opiate of the people.
Bountiful job creation also explains the rapid immigration the nation
has seen in recent decades, and this too drives participation down. The
Hispanic population has grown by close to four times since 1972, while
Asians have more than doubled since 1987. In 2002 those groups
comprised 14 and 4 percent of the population, respectively.14
Participation levels might decline because
many immigrants are not citizens (often because they are illegal), and
also because many come from political cultures that are less assertive
than ours. In the 2000 election, Hispanics were 4 percent less likely
to vote, and Asians 22 percent less likely, than were whites,
controlling for other determinants. These racial effects have grown
since 1984.
15 Ginsberg
and Mead 2004. To be black raised the chance of voting by 10
percent ceteris paribus. These analyses used the 2000 Current
Population Survey (CPS) Voter Supplement File. In another analysis,
using the 2000 Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, the negative
Hispanic and Asian effects were even larger.
Greater ethnic
pluralism also weakens social trust, impeding political cooperation
with others.
16Parallels with Poverty
Just as the report blames nonparticipation on a lack of resources, so
in the 1960s and 1970s most experts blamed poverty on social conditions
outside the poor themselves. Largely, working-aged parents and their
children were poor because the adults did not work regularly. Nonwork
in turn was correlated with low skills, minority status, disincentives
to work created by welfare, and so on. Most experts thought that
government had to push back those “barriers” before the
poor could work and get ahead. The analysis was deterministic, defining
the poor as the passive objects of outside forces, including
government.
But education, training, minority rights, and work incentives were
all improved, and work levels did not rise. So in the 1980s and 1990s
government started to require welfare adults to work as a condition of
aid. It also spent more on wage and child-care subsidies. Beginning in
1994, those steps, coupled with a superb economy, drove the majority of
recipients off welfare, mostly into jobs. The report ignores welfare
reform, but along with the economy, it was the chief force that
moderated trends toward inequality in the 1990s, because it drove up
work and earnings at the bottom of society.17
Blank and Haskins 2001. Welfare
reform is mentioned briefly and critically in the research summaries
about government and policy accompanying the report.
In the 1980s and 1990s, policy makers disbelieved the academic
research linking poverty to various disadvantages. In statistical
models, poverty might have many causes, but the explainers were often
conditions that the poor could change, and much variation was left
unexplained. So if government enforced work, behavior could change, and
it did. The poor, it turned out, were paralyzed, not by a lack of
freedom, but by too much of it. Alongside new benefits, they needed an
obligation to work.
In the epitome of reform, seen in Wisconsin, welfare adults faced
immediate and unyielding demands to work, but they were also lavishly
subsidized to work. Far from diminishing the public sector, the reform
was a governmental triumph that in some ways expanded the welfare
state.18
The task force report treats citizenship as if it
consisted only of claims to political and social rights. In welfare
reform, however, the emphasis was on the obligations of citizenship,
one of which is to work when employable. And it was this conception
that produced positive social change.
Should Participation Be Enforced?
Just as in the 1960s and 1970s government extended new benefits and
rights to the poor without expectations, so in promoting participation
it has assumed the whole burden of change. Since the 1960s, blacks have
been fully enfranchised, then provided with “majority
minority” election districts. Restrictions on registration and
voting were eased. Government also helped fund higher education levels,
which should also have raised voting turnout. Just as in earlier social
policy, government sought “barriers” to remove. And yet
turnout fell. It is time to stop blaming nonparticipation on outside
impediments. Very likely, political withdrawal is not due to inability
to participate, but rather to a lack of obligation to do so.
Should nonvoters be required to vote, as welfare recipients have been
made to work? Australia and Italy already mandate voting. On the one
hand, doing so flouts the idea that participation is self-motivated. On
the other hand, we enforce other civic duties, such as paying taxes and
serving on juries. In addition, union leaders and community activists
could put more pressure on people to join their organizations, the
better to pressure employers and governments for concessions. Such
bodies rarely grow just by opening doors; there must also be positive
suasions to join.19
To raise participation requires challenge, not solicitude. The
9/11 attacks dramatized this. When the World Trade Center
collapsed, egoistic New Yorkers changed in an instant into dutiful
citizens. They took the injured in off the street, flocked to the
disaster site offering to help, and donated rivers of blood.
Nationwide, distrust of government fell sharply, as the report notes,
while civic attitudes surged, at least briefly.20
No government effort to raise participation has had anything like this
effect. While no one would wish another 9/11, the moral is clear:
What engages people in public affairs is not merely the opportunity to
participate, but collective obligations that they cannot evade.
Good behavior must be enforced, not just facilitated. That implies
treating the disengaged as something more than victims. The
responsibility for nonparticipation must be divided between them and
society. The moralistic voice, which the report aims only at the elite,
must be turned on the political free riders as well. “What people
seem to want … is the power to participate, not the hard work of
actually doing so,” remarks Derek Bok. “In the end …
people do get the quality of government they deserve.”21
This report lacks that bracing but realistic tone.
The report asserts that, through research and advocacy, political
scientists can promote wider participation. But as the community
organizer Saul Alinsky always said, democracy cannot be given to
people—they must achieve it for themselves.22
In the
past, a more popular regime has always emerged when pressure from below
was spontaneous, triggered by some practical crisis, such as
joblessness or oppressive taxes. If there is now no such urge,
democratization must wait until there is. Or voting must be mandated.
The answer to elitism cannot be more elitism.
The Question of Competence
A hidden issue in the report, as in other discussions of social
problems, is the competence one attributes to those with the problems.
The apparent debate may be about the fairness of the opportunity
structure, but often the real issue is about how able people are to
exploit the opportunities they have. The more resourceful one finds
them, the more willing one is to hold them responsible, at least in
part, for the problems and their solution.
Traditionally, American politics assumed that formal political rights
were enough to give the people leverage. That imputed to them the
competence to advance their own interests. The report, however, adopts
the protective stance typical of academic poverty experts:
“[L]ess-advantaged Americans vote less because they
lack the skills, motivation, and networks that the better-advantaged
acquire through formal education and occupational
advancement.”23
Thus the
capabilities people do or do not have are attributed to their environment.
The affluent get no credit for participating, nor do the disadvantaged get
discredit for failing to do so. It sounds sophisticated and humane, but it
is also condescending. The unfortunate are exempted from any responsibility
for their weakness, reducing the potential for change.
Academic solicitude may seem realistic in an age when the worst-off
have more trouble functioning than they once did; after all, even the
better-off today experience politics mainly on television. But to lower
expectations clashes with the norms of citizenship in our heads, which
are much more demanding. Those conceptions go back to the hardier
Americans who first built this country, then fought in its wars, at
home and abroad, for the next two hundred years. To suggest, as the
report does, that the less fortunate are barred from influence by
inequality, when the vote and civil liberties are still available, is
something our ancestors would not understand.
To recover democracy, government must assume greater competence in
lower-income Americans than the elite finds comfortable. We would
rather lay the burden of change on ourselves than on the less
fortunate. We believe in our own abilities; we are less sure about
theirs. But unless some minimal capacities are expected of the less
privileged, change becomes unimaginable, and a caste society will
emerge. To prevent that, we must say to those at the bottom (to
paraphrase a famous political maxim): Don't get down, get even.
Only if the masses act is the solution really democratic.
To use English terminology, democracy is the creation of the
Roundheads—citizens below the elite who assert a belief in the
individual, independent of class, and insist on an egalitarian
politics. The Cavaliers are those who believe in a hierarchical polity
in which by nature they are destined to rule and others to follow.
America's founding was a great victory for the Roundheads; the
Civil War was another.24
But our society is becoming more stratified, by
race as well as class, and the ideal of equal citizenship is under
stress. A Cavalier politics threatens to reemerge. This report, with
its democratic rhetoric but aristocratic assumptions, dramatizes that
tension.
