Billionaires and Stealth Politics

by Benjamin I Page

  106. Duszak 2012. See Forbes 2014.

  107. Robinson- Jacobs 2016.

  108. Duszak 2012; Gold’s Gym 2012.

  109. It is also important to note that Crossroads GPS, a group closely associated with American Crossroads, does not have to disclose its donors. So any contributions Rowling has made to GPS are not included in these totals.

  110. Center for Responsive Politics, n.d.

  111. Texas Tribune, n.d.

  112. Waltzman 2012.

  113. Center for Responsive Politics, n.d.

  114. Texas Tribune, n.d.

  115. City of Dallas, n.d.

  116. Waltzman 2012.

  117. Waltzman 2012.

  118. That is, eight of the eighty- three billionaires who were active in business, and therefore might conceivably have pursued this business- oriented strategy, were in fact boundary controllers. Note, however, that the number of billionaires about whom the theory makes predictions is actually smaller, limited to those from states dominated by one political party.

  Chapter Six: What Is to Be Done about Billionaires?

  1. Some readers have suggested that that we should “triangulate” in on billionaires’ policy preferences by taking into account their financial contributions to candidates and any broad ideological statements they have made. But this entic-ing idea is an illusion. As we have noted, contributions are a very imperfect guide

  notes to pages 126–138

  179

  to policy preferences. (Inferences from contributions to Republicans would completely distort most billionaires’ liberal or libertarian views on social issues, for example, while social- or access- oriented contributions to Democrats would mask their economic conservatism.) Most ideological utterances are too vague to be very useful, but, in any case, they are extremely rare. We have looked hard. In extensive searches, using broad search terms, we found little beyond the phrases that we have quoted from the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson. Hardly any other billionaires who have been quiet about policy specifics have spoken about their general political ideologies.

  2. See Gilens 2012; Gilens and Page 2014; Page and Gilens 2017. In Gilens’s data, the policy preferences of “the average American” refer to the estimated preferences of the median- income respondent at the fiftieth percentile of the income distribution. These are nearly identical to the median preferences among survey respondents.

  3. See Bartels 2008, chap. 9, 259; Gilens 2012, chaps. 3 and 5; Gilens and Page 2014, 571, 575.

  4. In methodological terms, Gilens’s measures of the policy preferences of the affluent— which differ from average Americans’ preferences in the same directions but to a lesser extent than the preferences of very wealthy Americans do—

  may serve as proxies for the opinions of the truly wealthy.

  5. Existing research does not provide enough data points to estimate the full shape of the relationship between individuals’ levels of wealth and the extent of their economic conservatism. Data on average Americans, affluent Americans, and the SESA multimillionaires, however, suggests that the relationship is monotonic. The more wealth, the more conservative preferences. Even if there is a diminishing marginal effect of wealth— or, conceivably, a reversal of this trend at the very top— it seems likely that the average US billionaire is much more economically conservative than the average US adult.

  6. Page, Bartels, and Seawright 2013, 54.

  7. Page, Bartels, and Seawright 2013, 54, 56, 57. See also Page and Gilens 2017, chap. 4.

  8. Page, Bartels, and Seawright 2013, 58, 59, 61, 62.

  9. See Alvaredo et al . , n.d.; Piketty 2014; and the US data at http://wid.world/.

  10. See Khoury 2016; Cramer 2016; and Hochschild 2016. Some of these mat-

  ters are addressed in Page and Gilens 2017, chap.2.

  11. Once in office, however, President Trump pursued very conservative, orthodox Republican economic policies that seemed quite at odds with his populistic campaign rhetoric (“Drain the swamp!” “Plenty of jobs!”). At the time we write, one result appears to be electoral trouble for the Republicans and a high level of public resentment and cynicism aimed at both parties.

  12. See, for example, Page and Gilens 2017, chap. 3; Cramer 2016; Hochschild 2016.

  180

  notes to pages 140–143

  13. The “democracy voucher” idea comes from Lessig 2011, 266– 68 (see the revised version in Lessig 2015, 43– 44). It has roots in Hasen’s 1996 “coupons for democracy” and in Ackerman and Ayres’s 2002 “patriot dollars.” For a particularly egalitarian version of democracy vouchers, see Page and Gilens 2017, 191– 92.

  14. This has been an important theme in legal scholars’ proposals for— and critiques of— campaign finance reforms. See Lessig 2011, 364– 66; Lessig 2015, chap. 6.

  15. See Leighley and Nagler, especially 2013, also 1992a, 1992b, 2007; Schlozman, Verba, and Brady 2012. A number of “equal voice” reforms are discussed in Page and Gilens 2017, chap. 7.

  16. On structural reforms, see Page and Gilens 2017, chap. 8. Reich 2015 discusses a number of egalitarian economic reforms that have important political implications.

  17. See the discussion of the “get a senator” strategy in West 2014, 11– 15.

  18. The so- called Hastert rule, which dictates that only bills backed by a “majority of the majority party” will be considered in the House, can mean that bills favored by as many as 74 percent of all House members (an entire 49 percent minority party plus nearly half of a 51 percent majority party) can be blocked by a slight majority of the majority party.

  19. See Page and Gilens 2017, chaps. 8– 9.

  20. NAACP v. Alabama, 357 US 449 (1958).

  21. See the line of cases from Buckley v. Valeo, 424 US 1 (1976), to Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 US 310 (2010), and McCutcheon v.

  Federal Election Commission, 134 S. Ct. 1434 oe 572 U.S. ___, (2014).

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