Political voice in an age of inequality

Since the colonists chafed under the rule of the British king, a commitment to equality has formed a thread in American political discourse.1 But perhaps uniquely among values on which democracies rest, equality is a vexed concept. The men who met at Philadelphia to write the Constitution that continues to govern us were not equally committed to equality. With Shays's Rebellion and the threat of civil disorder in the background, some were concerned to protect the new government from the "temporary errors and delusions" of the people. Even dedicated egalitarians have not necessarily agreed about what democratic equality requires-at a minimum, equality before the law and equality of rights, but what about equality of opportunity? Equality of result? If equality of result, then equality with respect to which of many valued outcomes: economic reward? political power? social respect? To what degree do individual inequalities of condition become more acceptable if they do not aggregate into inequalities between groups defined by, say, race, ethnicity, or gender? In both political discourse and policy outcome, concern with equality has intensified and diminished throughout American history.2 The Revolutionary era, the years leading up to the Civil War, the decades of the New Deal and the Great Society were periods of greater rhetorical and policy commitment to equality. In contrast, our own era is one that celebrates the language of markets and has witnessed changes in an inegalitarian direction in policy areas that range from taxes to welfare. At the same time that Equality Talk has fallen into relative disrepute over the past generation, actual economic inequality has sharpened in the United States.While expert opinion converges in the conclusion that, by a variety of measures, economic inequality has become more pronounced since the late 1970s, there has been less attention-and less agreement- with regard to changing political inequalities among citizens. In this chapter, we consider the extent of inequalities among citizens in the expression of political voice, assess the degree to which those inequalities of political voice are changing in tandem with growing economic inequalities to become sharper, and consider the extent to which-if at all-substantial inequalities of political voice pose a grave threat to American democracy. These are matters about which facile conclusions are sometimes drawn before the facts are known. Our modus operandi is somewhat different from the approach taken by the other authors in this volume.An important part of our intellectual project is to lay out the evidence from a number of sources, including an important new data set about organized interests in Washington. The realities are more complicated than is sometimes appreciated. Doing justice to this complexity demands tolerance for quantitative evidence and circumspection in interpreting it.