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MICHAEL HOTCHKISS: How long ago
did you start this?
MARTIN GILENS: It was
before I got here.
I'd say about a decade.
MARTIN GILENS: So it has been
a long-term endeavour.
MICHAEL HOTCHKISS: So, you sort of touched on this, but
if you were to
just sort of summarize the
basic question that you're
trying to answer in the book,
what is that question?
MARTIN GILENS: The basic
question is do affluent
Americans have dominance over
the shape of government policy
making, and is that more
true now than it was
a few decades ago?
MICHAEL HOTCHKISS: So how did you go
about answering your question?
MARTIN GILENS: I collected
survey questions that had been
asked of national samples of
Americans, over a period of
many of decades.
And those questions asked people
whether they would
support or oppose specific
changes in
federal government policy.
And then I had an army of
research assistants code
whether the proposed changes
that the survey questions
referred to were, in
fact, adopted.
And with those data, and as I
put together a massive data
set with all that information,
with that I was able to assess
the probability that a change
in government policy would
take place, depending on how
much support or opposition it
had among lower or
middle-class or
higher-income Americans.
MICHAEL HOTCHKISS: So what are your
most important findings?
MARTIN GILENS: So the most
important findings are first,
that the degree of inequality
in influence over government
policy is enormous.
When preferences diverge, so
when the policy preferences of
the affluent differ from those
of the middle class or of the
poor, that what you see is
substantial influence by
affluent Americans over policy
outcomes, and essentially no
influence by people
with less income.
MICHAEL HOTCHKISS: And why
does that matter?
MARTIN GILENS: Well, it matters
for two reasons.
One is it matters in sort of a
broad, sort of abstract sense
in that to be a democracy means
that all citizens have
some ability to influence
the choices that
the government makes.
But in a more practical sense,
it matters because the
specific policies that result
from the influence of
different groups shape people's
lives in immensely
important ways.
MICHAEL HOTCHKISS: So what's your take
away from these findings?
MARTIN GILENS: There's
a few things.
So one would be to look at
campaign finance reforms.
In addition, because one of the
things that I found was
that political competition
seems to enhance
responsiveness of government to
the public and makes that
responsiveness more equal, that
other sorts of reforms,
which enhance political
competition, could help to
ameliorate the unequal
representation that I
show in this book.
And then the third way that this
could be addressed is to
focus on those sorts of policies
where affluent
Americans and less well-off
Americans agree, or at least
agree more.
And so things like government
support for education gets
strong support, even for people
at the top of the
income distribution.
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