The Poor and Democracy

   Given the constant tripe espoused by the right-wing in America about the poor voting for benefits. I thought it was time to hit back. What pushed me was this recent article "Registering the Poor to vote is Un-American" which contains a choice quote:

  "Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on 
registering the poor to vote?

Because they know the poor can be counted on

to vote themselves more benefits by electing

redistributionist politicians.  Welfare recipients are

particularly open to demagoguery and bribery."

This essentially sums up the Republican attitude to the poor and democracy. Given that it is a particular talking point and given that it is true that poorer demographics vote for less right-wing candidates (I am loathe to call the Democrats left-wing as, at best, they approach centre), it would make for an interesting investigation to determine whether or not this position is true. Well first off the figures on welfare and its effectiveness in America are telling. It is not, however, what I want to focus on and so I'll just give you the figure above which is a chart showing average monthly welfare benefits in 2006 dollars.

     Instead I want to ask whether or not the poor, by weight of numbers, have a strong influence on policy decisions and despite the nominal notion of democracy the answer would seem to be no. I refer the reader to this paper by Martin Gilens of Princeton University: Inequality and Democratic Reponsiveness in the United States.

Abstract:

"In this paper, I examine the extent to which the link between public preferences and government policy is biased toward the preferences of high-income Americans. Using an original data set of almost 2,000 survey questions on proposed policy changes between 1981 and 2002, I find a moderately strong relationship between what the public wants and what the government does, albeit with a strong bias toward the status quo. But I also find that when Americans with different income levels differ in their policy preferences, actual policy outcomes strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent but bear little relationship to the preferences of poor or middle income Americans....."


  The graphs alone are most telling of the impact of wealth on democratic power:

     The 10th percentile (those richer than or equal to exactly 10 percent of people) have essentially no influence on democratic decisions whereas the 90th percentile (those richer than or equal to 90 percent of people) can greatly impact policy decisions. Even the 50th percentile (those richer than 50 percent of people) have nowhere near the influence of the top 10 percent. Now that we have tested this empirically (something Republicans loath) the evidence is fairly clear, the idea that the poor have a disproportionate impact on democracy due to weight of numbers is clearly incorrect and instead we see that the idea that big business and the wealthy having an unfair stake in democracy is true.

  Can we expect the Republicans, among others, to drop this notion of 'mob rule' and voting for benefits? Not very likely. It makes for good (if wholly incorrect) politics. The only time the poor have any reasonable say (in proportion to their numbers) is when the issues are of high salience (or the rich agree).

   Unfortunately I don't think that this political sleight of hand and its accompanying red scare elements (highly evident in the American Thinker article) will be leaving American politics anytime soon. Instead, I imagine it will be used as a stick to beat the poor and reduce their power even further, both through technocratic developments and by using this idea of the poor voting for money as a rhetorical device. Time will tell.