Professors Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page analyzed over two decades of data to answer a fundamental question: Does the government represent the people?
After examining nearly 2,000 public opinion surveys and comparing them to actual policy outcomes, they discovered that the opinions of 90% of Americans have virtually no impact on legislation.
In a representative democracy, the more people like a bill, the more likely it would be to become law.
However, in reality, public support has almost no influence on what laws are passed. Whether there is 0% or 100% support for a policy, there’s a 30% likelihood that it will become law.
Sources
- Gilens and Page, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” Perspective on Politics, 2014.
- Washington Post, “Rich People Rule!” 2014.
- Washington Post, “Once again, U.S. has most expensive, least effective health care system in survey,” 2014.
- Forbes Opinion, “The tax code is a hopeless complex, economy-suffocating mess,” 2013.
- CNN, “Americans pay more for slower Internet,” 2014.
- The Hill, “Sanders requests DOD meeting over wasteful spending,” 2015.
- CBS News, “Wastebook 2014: Government’s questionable spending,” 2014.
- The Heritage Foundation, Budget Book, 2015.
- The Atlantic, “American schools vs. the world: expensive, unequal, bad at math,” 2013.
- CNN Opinion, “War on drugs a trillion-dollar failure,” 2012.
- Feeding America, Child Hunger Fact Sheet, 2014.
- New York Times, “Banks’ lobbyists help in drafting financial bills,” 2014.
- New York Times, “Wall Street seeks to tuck Dodd-Frank changes in budget bill,” 2014
- Sunlight Foundation, “Fixed Fortunes: Biggest corporate political interests spend billions, get trillions,” 2014.