In American Politics, the Wealthy Get What They Want - See more at: http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/04/17/American-Politics-Wealthy-Get-What-They-Want#sthash.cpOcA2Ch.dpuf

Not news, just comfirmation of the obvious.

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/04/17/American-Politics-Wealthy-Get-What-They-Want

Rob GarverThe Fiscal Times
April 17, 2014

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Martin Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern conducted an extensive study of how major questions of public policy were decided over the course of the 20 years between 1981 and 2002. Their conclusions, scheduled for publication in the Fall issue of the journal Perspectives on Policy, were not happy ones for people who believe that the United States is a majoritarian democracy.

“When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” they write.

This is not to say that the average voter’s policy choices are never realized. The study found that in a large number of cases, the policy preferences of the median voter and the economic elite coincide. The most significant finding relates to the instances where the majority of voters disagree with the economic elite.

“In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes,” the study finds. “When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.”

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the data suggests “the net alignments of the most influential, business oriented groups are negatively related to the average citizen’s wishes.”

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