Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age |  | Author: Larry M. Bartels
Publisher: Princeton University Press
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Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 89619
Media: Hardcover
Edition: First Edition first Printing
Pages: 344
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2
ISBN: 0691136637
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.973
EAN: 9780691136639
ASIN: 0691136637
Publication Date: April 7, 2008
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Product Description
Using a vast swath of data spanning the past six decades, Unequal Democracy debunks many myths about politics in contemporary America, using the widening gap between the rich and the poor to shed disturbing light on the workings of American democracy. Larry Bartels shows the gap between the rich and poor has increased greatly under Republican administrations and decreased slightly under Democrats, leaving America grossly unequal. This is not simply the result of economic forces, but the product of broad-reaching policy choices in a political system dominated by partisan ideologies and the interests of the wealthy. Bartels demonstrates that elected officials respond to the views of affluent constituents but ignore the views of poor people. He shows that Republican presidents in particular have consistently produced much less income growth for middle-class and working-poor families than for affluent families, greatly increasing inequality. He provides revealing case studies of key policy shifts contributing to inequality, including the massive Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 and the erosion of the minimum wage. Finally, he challenges conventional explanations for why many voters seem to vote against their own economic interests, contending that working-class voters have not been lured into the Republican camp by "values issues" like abortion and gay marriage, as commonly believed, but that Republican presidents have been remarkably successful in timing income growth to cater to short-sighted voters. Unequal Democracy is social science at its very best. It provides a deep and searching analysis of the political causes and consequences of America's growing income gap, and a sobering assessment of the capacity of the American political system to live up to its democratic ideals.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 17
 Don't get this on a Kindle November 12, 2009
Dean S. Maclaughlin (Boston MA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
While I think that the premise and argument of this book is accurate, I have found the Kindle edition practically unreadable. The author relies on lots of tables, which are unreadable even when zoomed. Other tables in the text bleed off the right edge of the screen. Sloppy conversion to Kindle!
 I had to stop August 29, 2009
P. T. Doolan (USA)
1 out of 7 found this review helpful
I had to stop reading this "fact heavy" book. The one year lag (the foundation to the author's position) is a classic example of confusing a statistical relationship with causation. I decided to give the author the benefit of the doubt early in my reading and plowed on.....but it just got worse. In the end, this textbook comes across as another that speaks to the ignorance of the voting public - vote Republican and lose income growth. Maybe the solution is to only let academics vote?
 Important book on how US politics works January 29, 2009
Public Health Advocate (Louisville, KY)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
Basically this book, Unequal Democracy, tackles a huge and very important topic; economic inequality in the U.S. has gone up sharply in recent decades, yet the political system has failed to respond in effective ways to this problem. Indeed, many policies have made inequality worse, such as letting the real value of the minimum wage (after inflation) dramatically drop, and passing huge tax cuts the benefits of which disprorptionately go to the top one per cent income bracket. Bartels reasonably enough asks how this can happen in a democratic society. His answers are not definitive, but they certainly are thought-provoking and the product of careful research. He emphasizes that voters mostly vote on economic issues, but they clearly don't do so very thoughtfully. He argues that they respond automatically, a bit like Pavlov's dogs, to the state of the economy in an election year, rather than looking at the overall record of the two parties on economic issues. He also makes the reasonable point that there's little sign that the opinions of much of the public (especially the poorest one third) have much impact on politicians at all; the political system is clearly more responsive, as one might expect, to the interests of the wealthy. A disturbing reality, but Bartels makes a strong case for it.
One weakness to the book is that Bartels utterly rejects Tom Frank's view in "What's the Matter with Kansas?" that voters are distracted from economic policy by social and religious issues (abortion, evolution, etc.), emotionally stirring if often symbolic issues that encourage voters to ignore their economic self-interest by voting for Republicans. Against Frank's view, Bartels claims that voters mostly still vote on economic grounds, and that poor voters (those in the bottom third) still mostly vote Democratic, though he has to acknowledge, as everyone knows, that the Democrats have lost enormous ground among white southerners. This part of the book is under-theorized and not completely convincing; after all, the economic part of his case suggests that a huge majority of the population get little from electing Republican politicians, yet they win plenty of elections. It's hard to believe that social issues have no impact whatsoever on Republican success; why would canny and cynical people like Karl Rove keep urging Republicans to play up these social issues if they didn't help Republicans at the polls?
This significant caveat aside, this book needs to be read and widely discussed: finding a way to get our politics to address the reality of our economic problems in a just way is one of the defining issues of our time. If you care about a just society, two words: read it.
Politics Matters January 3, 2009
R. Albin (Ann Arbor, Michigan United States)
3 out of 4 found this review helpful
This very interesting book is an exploration of the nature of American politics and its relationship to inequality in the USA. Bartels summarizes a great deal of his own work and considerable other work on these topics. Bartels begins by demonstrating the marked increase in economic inequality characteristic of the last three decades. He then goes on to present reasonable evidence that a major determinant of rising inequality is who controls the Federal government, particularly the White House. Under Democratic Presidents, overall growth tends to be higher overall and particularly higher for the lower class and middle class; under Republican administrations, upper class, especially very wealthy individuals, tend to be very strongly favored. Bartels explores the basis for these effects, which he finds to be rooted in a combination of tax policy and macroenomic policies favored by the different parties. Given the marked difference in the consequences of electing Democratic and Republican presidents for the considerable majority of Americans, why have Republican Presidential candidates been so successful in the past 3 decades? Bartels effectively attacks the notion that "cultural issues" like abortion access are key to Republican success. He presents data attesting to the salience of class based economic issues. Republican success is particularly surprising in view of data Bartels presents indicating that Americans as a group generally express somewhat egalitarian sentiments.
The answer to this question is that a combination of factors tend to favor Republican candidates. What Bartels refers to as voter myopia is a major factor. While Presidential elections function as referenda on economic management, voters focus on economic performance in the election year, not on the whole prior Presidential term. In the past 30 years, this has tended to favor Republican candidates. This is partly luck, though for the case of the 1972 election, it is believed that Fed Chairman Arthur Burns manipulated interest rates to assist Richard Nixon. The apparently irrational tendency of voters to judge economic performance by the relative success of the upper class also assists Republicans, as does the fact that affluent, more Republican, voters tend to provide more financial resources for campaigns.
These vagaries of voting behavior are examples of how our political system fails to translate public sentiment into actual policy. Bartels provides 3 further examples of such failures. Tax cuts, the estate tax, and failure to keep the minimum wage current with inflation all represent situations in which public policy does not reflect well established public opinion. Bartels has some useful discussions of prior literature addressing these kinds of failures of our political system. Bartels also presents data arguing, at least for the US Senate, that the opinions of lower class voters have little impact on policy formation. The ultimate conclusion is that we have less a democracy than a form of oligarchy, and one slanted heavily towards the affluent.
This is generally a well written and well argued book. It is, however, a bit uncomfortably in between a purely scholarly monograph and a truly popular book. Its excellent that Bartels present so much of his analysis and data, but there is no methodological explanations. Given that he apparently wanted to reach a fairly wide audience, a methodological appendix describing his datasets and methods would have been useful, including limits of methods. Multivariate linear regression seems to have been a major tool and an important limitation is that this is essentially a correlational method. Bartels' analyses seem reasonable and generally convincing but some are arguable. At one point, he argues for the importance of ideology in voter interpretation of economic inequality, suggesting that both well informed liberal and conservative voters are biased by their ideological convictions. Given the data presented on inequality, its equally plausible that well informed liberal voters are actually more objective about the present state of affairs than well informed conservative voters.
A final corollary of Bartels' work is that the behavior of elites matter tremendously. This is perhaps where the combination of self-interest and ideology divorced from reality can have its most destructive effects.
Facts everyone should know December 29, 2008
J. A. Mills
1 out of 3 found this review helpful
"Unequal Democracy" is a tough read for the average reader. Half-page footnotes and statistics usually put people off. But I wish I could require all our government officials and even all voters to read this book. The research is solid and the conclusions important to the future well-being of our democracy. I was particularly impressed by the cross-testing he did to check his assumptions. I recommend this to all my college students and to all serious readers. (You can skip the footnotes if you like.)
Showing reviews 1-5 of 17
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