Note: the dark line graph is associated with the left index,
the grey bar graph, with the right.
Its not just that the line hardly climbs -- although try as I might, I do not cease to find that slope has a certain bitter humour, a sense of timing if you will.
From the Sunlight Foundation.
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American Oligarchy:
How the preferences of elites shape policy outcomes
by Alexander Furnas
APRIL 17, 2014, 1:40 P.M.
Sunlight Foundation
At Sunlight we spend a lot of time trying to make sense of who has a say in the policy making process, and whose perspective is being heard. Time and time again we find that well-organized corporate interests are far more involved in the process than ordinary citizens, or the underfunded groups that seek to represent them.
Now, a recent paper — forthcoming in Perspectives on Politics by political scientists Marty Gilens of Princeton and Benjamin Page of Northwestern — has provided some really striking empirical evidence that the kinds of imbalances we have observed anecdotally in our work at Sunlight are actually systematic features of modern American democracy. The preferences of economic elites and business interests, according to Gilens and Page, significantly shape policy outcomes — and the preferences of average citizens simply don’t.
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Be seeing you.
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