Saturday, March 19, 2022
Gilens Presents Testing Theories Of American Politics: Elites, Curiosity Teams, And Common Residents At The Oxford-Virginia Authorized Dialogs
Martin Gilens (UCLA) introduced Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Curiosity Teams, and Common Residents (with Benjamin Web page (Northwestern; Google Scholar)) yesterday on the Oxford-Virginia Authorized Dialogs hosted by Tsilly Dagan and Ruth Mason.
Every of 4 theoretical traditions within the examine of American politics—which will be characterised as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Financial-Elite Domination, and two forms of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—gives totally different predictions about which units of actors have how a lot affect over public coverage: common residents; financial elites; and arranged curiosity teams, mass-based or business-oriented.
An excessive amount of empirical analysis speaks to the coverage affect of 1 or one other set of actors, however till not too long ago it has not been potential to check these contrasting theoretical predictions towards one another inside a single statistical mannequin. We report on an effort to take action, utilizing a singular knowledge set that features measures of the important thing variables for 1,779 coverage points.
Multivariate evaluation signifies that financial elites and arranged teams representing enterprise pursuits have substantial impartial impacts on U.S. authorities coverage, whereas common residents and mass-based curiosity teams have little or no impartial affect. The outcomes present substantial help for theories of Financial-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, however not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
Commentator: Daniel Shaviro (NYU)
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2022/03/gilens-presents-testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens-.html
