Plan of the Book

Decades ago Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, " We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both. " We now live in what has been christened a " new gilded age. " Wealth in the United States is indeed concentrated in the hands of a few— more so than at any time since the 1920s. In this book I examine the relationship between individual Americans' fi nancial resources and their political power, seeking to understand the extent to which contemporary America confi rms Justice Brandeis's grim assertion. Citizens in every society are unequal in many ways. But democracy is commonly understood to entail a substantial degree of political equality, even in the face of social and economic inequalities. In Robert Dahl's formulation , a central characteristic of democracy is " the continuing responsiveness of the government to the preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals. " This ideal of political equality is perhaps impossible to fully achieve in the face of economic inequality— in every democracy citizens with greater resources are better able to shape government policy to their liking. But the degree of political inequality in a society, and the conditions that exacerbate or ameliorate it, tell us much about the quality of the society's democracy. My goal in this book is to document and explain patterns of representation in the United States over the past few decades by examining the relationship between the policy preferences expressed by the American public and the policies adopted by decision makers in Washington. To do so I have assembled a dataset of survey questions reflecting the policy preferences of Americans at different income levels. These data reflect the answers given by hundreds of thousands of respondents to questions about all sorts of government policies— from raising the minimum wage, to restricting abortions, to sending U.S. troops to Bosnia. In the chapters that follow, I analyze these data by comparing the support for specifi c changes in national policy expressed by lower-or higher-income Ameri-cans with the course of actual policy as determined by the president and Congress. What I fi nd is hard to reconcile with the notion of political equality in Dahl's formulation of democracy. The American government does respond to the public's preferences, but that responsiveness is strongly tilted toward the most affluent …