Steve Reads

Democrats are better for the economy, says Larry Bartels, and they’re better for the poor. He backs this up with an arsenal of data on rates and causes of inequality over the last 50 years under Republican and Democratic presidents. Inequality systematically increases under Republicans and decreases under Democrats. Bartels doesn’t linger much over the mechanism which might make this true; he hypothesizes that Republicans emphasize inflation-lowering policies that help mostly businessmen, while Democrats fight unemployment that largely afflicts the poor.

So if Republicans are bad for the majority of us, why do they win elections? A good part of the answer, says Bartels, is that Americans have short memories: they respond much more intensely to economic gain in the year right before an election than they do to economic loss in the preceding three. And American political opinion suffers from an unfortunate inconsistency: people claim to be in favor of reducing inequality at the same time that they support policies which further it. No matter how you frame it, for instance, Americans have overwhelmingly supported ending the estate tax since the 1930′s, even though it demonstrably only affects the wealthiest 1% or 2% of the population. And this inconsistency doesn’t go away with education: virtually every way you cut the data, clear majorities support doing away with the tax on inherited estates.

Why, then, did the inheritance tax persist until President Bush and a Republican Congress took control? Because ideology trumps the popular will much of the time. Democrats managed to keep the estate tax around until the rare combination of circumstances that allowed it to be overthrown. Bartels’s analysis shows that ideology persists as an explanation, even after other factors like voter wealth are removed. Ideology matters. If this elicited a “well, duh” from you, then you and the author of this review have something in common. More along these lines below.

Bartels’s statistical tables contain both estimates and standard errors, and much of the time the standard errors dwarf the estimates. That is, there’s more noise than signal. Often that’s because his statistics rest on small numbers (e.g., the set of all presidents from 1945 to the present.) And yet the graphs used to illustrate the tables are notably lacking in error bars: they’re just confident straight lines. I’d have much more faith in the book’s statistical conclusions if Bartels were more careful to point out fuzziness.

That said, a good many of the relations in the book do seem pretty cut-and-dried, like the relationship between an incumbent party’s popular-vote margin and income growth in the year before an election. It is striking how reliably the latter predicts the former, and how unreliably cumulative income growth (that is, income growth over the full four years of the incumbent’s term) does so. If nothing else, Bartels’s book has pointed out some patterns that have raised eyebrows and will certainly drive a lot of research.

Unequal Democracy is, unfortunately, a highly academic book: it seems very concerned to establish ideas rigorously that the rest of the world has long since taken for granted, out of the sheer analytical joy of doing so. Thus we wait 250 pages to see Bartels announce: “I find that senators in this period were vastly more responsive to affluent constituents than to constituents of modest means.” This is why we pay political scientists the big bucks. And yet to read Bartels, political science as a discipline only understands democracies as a collection of autonomous equals. So Unequal Democracy constitutes an advance. So much the worse for political science. I have my doubts that anyone outside of political science will get much from the book.

In particular — once again, assuming Bartels has summarized the literature propertly — political science seems to have missed out on the collective-action problem in economics. As Mancur Olson noted in The Logic of Collective Action in 1965 (and I don’t think he was the first), there’s a problem when policies stand to benefit one group while they spread their harms across the whole population: the group will lobby intensely for the policy, while the rest of the population stands mute. Compact interest groups are really important, if only for this reason. Yet Bartels doesn’t even start to discuss their effect on policy. He also never stops to touch on the disfranchisement of the poor. This was a large part of The Conscience of a Liberal: Krugman asserts that our nation’s growing inequality stems in large part from weakened labor unions, which used to help bring the poor to the polls.

In short, Bartels is looking at the American political scene from a high statistical level, never descending to the foundations. And his book will not help us change the situation.

In a world where The Conscience of a Liberal and Paul Farmer exist, I can’t recommend Unequal Democracy.