New study finds US to be ruled by oligarchic elite | ROAR Magazine

New study finds US to be ruled by oligarchic elite | ROAR Magazine

It’s not every day that an academic
article in the arcane world of American political science makes
headlines around the world, but then again, these aren’t normal days
either. On Wednesday, various mainstream media outlets — including even the conservative British daily The Telegraph — ran a series of articles with essentially the same title: “Study finds that US is an oligarchy.” Or, as the Washington Post summed up: “Rich people rule!” The paper, according to the review in the Post, “should reshape how we think about American democracy.”

The
conclusion sounds like it could have come straight out of a general
assembly or drum circle at Zuccotti Park, but the authors of the paper
in question — two Professors of Politics at Princeton and Northwestern
University — aren’t quite of the radical dreadlocked variety. No, like Piketty’s book,
this article is real “science”. It’s even got numbers in it! Martin
Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern University took a
dataset of 1,779 policy issues, ran a bunch of regressions, and

basically found that the United States is not a democracy after all:

Multivariate
analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups
representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on
U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest
groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide
substantial support for theories of Economic Elite Domination and for
theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian
Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

 

Political scientists show that
average American has “near-zero” influence on policy outcomes, but their
groundbreaking study is not without problems.