The Political Influence of Economic Elites

A working group in the Social Inequality program examining the mechanisms through which economic elites influence politics, and the relationship between money, politics, and inequality. Both scholars and citizens suspect economic elites have great influence on politics. Yet the scholarly research on money in politics has generally concluded that wealthy individuals and interest groups cannot simply 'buy votes' in institutions like Congress. This has led some to argue that the influence of money upon American political life is either 'not much' or under estimated. The research findings in this tradition have mostly looked at the effects of campaign contributions upon Congressional roll call voting. The work is analytically sophisticated, and there are few reasons to doubt these particular empirical findings. However, the findings are of such a narrow range of phenomena that they miss much of the relationship between money and politics. Simply looking at roll call votes misses the 'doing of politics', and in particular, the entire sequence of political processes: how money might influence what does and does not arrive upon the floor for a vote, in what form it arrives, and then, how it is (or is not) implemented and enforced. To address some of these issues, the Foundation issued an RFP in 2006 as part of a new research initiative to investigate the Politics of Inequality. This ongoing initiative is an effort to improve our understanding of how rising inequality has influenced the U.S. political process and the policies it has produced. Building on this initiative, sociologist Shamus Khan and political scientist Dorian Warren of Columbia University, together with thirteen other leading social scientists, have formed a working group to expand the research field of economic influence on political life by examining how economic elites have influenced the myriad ways politics is done and the relationship between these processes and inequality. The research questions to be explored through this Working Group are twofold. First, how do elites use their economic resources to influence political outcomes? And second, what and how is the relationship between that influence and inequality? The first question requires (a) exploring new terrain, what the Working Group is calling the expanded 'doing of politics'; and (b) using this new terrain to test established (and discarded) mechanisms of influence, as well as to identify new ones. To address the second question, the working group will examine: (a) how the increase in inequality over the past forty years —particularly the increase in the wealth/income share of elites — has impacted processes of political influence; and (b) how the outcomes of political influence have affected the overall levels of inequality.