The SLEDGE-A-TORIAL - Economic Advantage and Legislative Action

Did you ever get the feeling that THEY aren't listening to you? Ever feel that your government representative, be it senator, house member, or even president isn't listening to you AT ALL? Well, you're not alone. I found the following recently, and quite frankly, it's FASCINATING.  Larry Bartels, formerly of Princeton University's Department of Politics and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs (now working for Vanderbilt), wrote a piece on this very topic, this copy last revised in 2005.  It's 54 pages long, but once you get through the dry stuff (or I guess DRYER stuff) it's really compelling. In short, it compares public opinion polls with senate voting data.  Essentially, it examines the effect (if any) to legislation, of public opinion.  The interesting thing about this work is that he focuses on public opinion polls that were arranged by income levels. Here it is in his words:

"I examine the differential responsiveness of U.S. senators to the preferences of wealthy, middleclass,

and poor constituents. My analysis includes broad summary measures of senators’ voting

behavior as well as specific votes on the minimum wage, civil rights, government spending, and

abortion. In almost every instance, senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the

opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the

opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent

statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes. Disparities in representation are especially

pronounced for Republican senators, who were more than twice as responsive as Democratic

senators to the ideological views of affluent constituents. These income-based disparities in

representation appear to be unrelated to disparities in turnout and political knowledge and only

weakly related to disparities in the extent of constituents’ contact with senators and their staffs."

Sure, you might say that this was last updated in 2005, so this CAN'T possibly still be the case, right?  Well, not only would you be wrong, I'd love to be in your shoes and see the world again through your innocent eyes.  Let's take a look at a recent example: In a recent Gallup Poll on the "Buffet Rule," it was seen to be favored by those polled 60% to 37% opposed.  Later, the day of the vote, a CNN poll showed that 72% of those polled favored it versus 27% opposed. It died in the senate, along mostly party lines. If you're not familiar with the "Buffet Rule," it would be a tax plan would apply a minimum tax rate of 30 percent on individuals making more than a million dollars a year. The new tax rate would directly affect 0.3 percent of taxpayers. Even before this, an attempt to stop subsidies going to large oil companies similarly died in the senate.  Similarly, the idea of stopping such subsidies polls quite well. I guess the only way to get what you want from the government is to have enough money to buy out legislators.  Nice. Look, I find myself squarely in the middle politically.  I'm a guy that was at first in favor of Obama, but his ingnoring basic war crimes laws and his strange fascination with appealing to a base of voters he has no hope of winning over, so I'm certainly no friend of his.  More on that later.  But I certainly can't find any safe haven with today's republican either.  So I'm pretty much fucked in the ass politically. But for chrissakes, if we're going to be fucked in the ass, at least have the decency to give us a fucking reacharound every now and again.  At least pretend that public opinion matters.