Suchergebnisse

Can a country be a democracy if its government only responds to the preferences of the rich? In an ideal democracy, all citizens should have equal influence on government policy--but as this book demonstrates, America's policymakers respond almost exclusively to the preferences of the economically advantaged. Affluence and Influence definitively explores how political inequality in the United States has evolved over the last several decades and how this growing disparity has been shaped by interest groups, parties, and elections. With sharp analysis and an impressive range of.

Tackling one of the most volatile issues in contemporary politics, Martin Gilens's work punctures myths and misconceptions about welfare policy, public opinion, and the role of the media in both. Why Americans Hate Welfare shows that the public's views on welfare are a complex mixture of cynicism and compassion; misinformed and racially charged, they nevertheless reflect both a distrust of welfare recipients and a desire to do more to help the ""deserving"" poor. ""With one out of five children currently living in poverty and more than 100,000 families with children now hom

"Drawing on surveys of public attitudes and analyses of more than forty years of television and newsmagazine stories on poverty, Gilens demonstrates how public opposition to welfare is fed by a potent combination of racial stereotypes and misinformation about the true nature of America's poor. But white Americans don't oppose welfare simply because they think it benefits blacks; rather, they think it benefits "undeserving" blacks who would rather live off the government than work, a perception powerfully fueled by the media's negative coverage of the black poor." "The public's views on welfare, Gilens shows, are a complex mixture of cynicism and compassion; misinformed and racially charged, they nevertheless reflect both a distrust of welfare recipients and a desire to do more to help the "deserving" poor."--Jacket.

This note is a response to Omar Bashir's 2015 paper "Testing inferences about American politics: A review of the 'oligarchy' result," Research & Politics 2(4).

In a recent article in PS, Soroka and Wlezien (2008) argue that the policy
preferences of low- and high-income Americans rarely differ, and
therefore that "regardless of whose preferences policymakers follow
… policy will end up in essentially the same place" (325). In this
article, I analyze a much larger and more diverse set of policies
than those examined by Soroka and Wlezien and show that income-based
preference gaps are much larger and more widespread than their data
suggest. In terms of federal government policy, the affluent are far
better represented than the poor; the findings in this paper
indicate that this representational inequality has substantial
repercussions across a wide range of policy issues.

In contrast with the expectations of many analysts, I find that raw policy-specific facts, such as the direction of change in the crime rate or the amount of the federal budget devoted to foreign aid, have a significant influence on the public's political judgments. Using both traditional survey methods and survey-based randomized experiments, I show that ignorance of policy-specific information leads many Americans to hold political views different from those they would hold otherwise. I also show that the effect of policy-specific information is not adequately captured by the measures of general political knowledge used in previous research. Finally, I show that the effect of policy-specific ignorance is greatest for Americans with the highest levels of political knowledge. Rather than serve to dilute the influence of new information, general knowledge (and the cognitive capacities it reflects) appears to facilitate the incorporation of new policy-specific information into political judgments.