Democracy and Its Discontents, Ep. 2: Money and Power

Introduction

Democracy is supposed to be by and for the people. 

But limitless and unregulated money flowing into politics—and especially into elections—gives outsized influence to elites and weakens the voice of the majority, leaving ordinary citizens disaffected and disillusioned.

[Marty Gilens: “Our policy has, in many dimensions—whether it’s regulation, taxation, and so on—shifted in ways that are beneficial to business and to owners and to the rich, and harmful to the middle class and to the poor.”]

I’m Lindsay Shingler. This is a special miniseries from Talking Policy we’re calling: “Democracy and Its Discontents.”

Over the course of five conversations, we’ll explore some of the underlying dynamics that seem to be driving polarization, and opening the door for aspiring autocrats. 

In this episode, we’ll talk with Marty Gilens, a professor of public policy at UCLA, and the author of Democracy in America? What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It.

We’ll look at the role of money in U.S. elections, and what it’s doing to our belief in the democratic process. 

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Lindsay: So, Americans seem to be disillusioned with the political system. It sort of feels like people are either checked out, or they’re tuned in and—and despairing. You know, it’s routine now to hear friends talk about leaving the country. That was—that didn’t used to be routine, for people to—to talk about going to Canada or something.

So, I mean, maybe, we’ve always had mixed feelings, uh, about politics, but it feels worse now. Do you agree? And, and how bad is it? Like, where are we?

Marty: Yeah, I think Americans are extremely disillusioned. In fact, more than disillusioned, I think they’re disgusted and depressed with our political system and the state of our politics. 

I don’t think it’s something that’s new, but it certainly has been getting worse over time. So, on surveys, most Americans now say that most politicians don’t care what people like them think. And that was not the case historically. In most presidential elections, at least one of the two leading party candidates has been viewed favorably by a majority of the citizens, until 2016. That was the first election—where Trump ran against Hillary Clinton—where neither candidate had majority sort of favorability. And that was true again in 2020, and now in 2024.

People are just, you know, very unhappy with the state of our politics. They think the parties would rather fight against each other than work together to address America’s problems. And frankly, they’re right about that.

Lindsay: So we’re here to look at sort of the drivers of this disillusionment and talking about American democracy and how democratic it is—or isn’t. And what you’ve hinted at is that Americans don’t feel that their government is particularly responsive to their needs. 

We tend to have pretty short memories when it comes to politics, and so I’m curious, you know, if we had to look at this story over time, where does this start? Where do you start telling this story of American inequality and an unresponsive government?

Marty: You know, I think there tends to be one of two places where people begin, and where I have begun, in sort of thinking about how we got to where we are today. And one is to look back toward the 1950s, which was a time of, of course, much less political polarization.

It was a period when both political parties sort of agreed that government can do things to help citizens. You know, much stronger belief in government, much less cynicism, and more trust in political institutions—not just government but also, you know, the media and religious leaders, and the military and so on.

It wasn’t, of course, a golden age in every respect. There was just, you know, horrible racial discrimination, both on an individual level and built into the many government policies. Gay sex was a crime in most U.S. states in the 1950s. And in the post-war period, you know, the opportunities for women had shrunk, in terms of jobs, relative to what they had been in the 1920s.

So, you know, it wasn’t a golden age in all respects, but in many ways it was. And economically, it was a good time where there was a lot of economic growth and that growth was widely shared. So there was, you know, sort of improved, lifestyles and, and, opportunities for the majority of Americans, for middle class people, expansions of higher education, homeownership, you know, a lot of this, you know, sort of furthered by government policies, and then the adoption of Medicare and Medicaid.

So there was a lot going on that was broadly beneficial for American citizens and, seemed, at least, you know, to different degrees, to be endorsed by both political parties. 

Now, the other way of thinking about this story is that the 1950s were in many ways the exception to American history. And that if we go back further, we see other periods that are more similar to our own.

So, in particular, the Gilded Age at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century also saw very high levels of economic inequality, you know, more or less comparable to our own. We saw a government that was very ineffective, seemed to be dominated by moneyed interests, by the—you know—monopolies and trusts of the time.

We saw a conservative Supreme Court that was striking down progressive laws on things like child labor, and minimum wage, and so on. And that did lead to the progressive movement, and to some political changes. And then, of course, combined with the response to the Great Depression, Roosevelt’s New Deal, and so on, you know, we saw a variety of changes, that then sort of led us into the 1950s and then back in some ways to today. To where—we might argue—we were similarly situated 100 years ago or 120 years ago.

Lindsay: So a lot of your research—some of your most interesting research has analyzed proposed policy changes over a given period of time and looked at how government responsiveness or lack thereof to the majority has shifted. 

Where are we now? If the 1950s was a little better, where are we today? What has your research shown?

Marty: So I’ve looked at a few decades of data on government responsiveness to public preferences and focused on the sort of differential responsiveness to different groups within the public, and in particular, the tendency for policymakers to respond to the preferences and the needs of high-income people and moneyed interest groups, rather than, sort of, average citizens.

And I didn’t find any sort of golden age of responsiveness. What I did find that has changed over time is the amount of money in our elections and the source of that money.

And there, the trends are very clear that the amount of money has increased enormously over time and the source of that money has become more and more concentrated among a smaller group of very wealthy individuals.

Lindsay: So, you find that support or opposition among economic elites or organized, like, business interest groups, strongly predicts whether or not a proposed policy change is adopted or not? 

Whereas, the preferences of middle-income or poor Americans have almost no relationship to the outcome—is that right?

Marty: Yeah, that is exactly right. And, you know, when I started that work, I expected—as I think most people would—that people with more money have more political influence. So, it wasn’t surprising that there were differences in that regard. And, you know, this notion that, sort of, the average citizen or the median voter, you know, is what politicians respond to, I don’t think was ever very realistic and certainly not something that many Americans, you know, would have agreed with. 

But the extent of the inequality and the absolute lack of impact of the preferences of ordinary citizens, of middle-income Americans, I found was shocking and dismaying.

Lindsay: So, ordinary citizens are ignored when their preferences do not align with the preferences of the economic elites. You wrote—in a piece for The Monkey Cage—you said, “many Americans voting for outsider candidates”—and I think by that you mean people like Trump, people like Bernie Sanders— “believe that government pretty much ignores people like them, and we think they’re right.”

Very provocative statement. So again, going back to the 1950s to where we are today, the question is—and you’ve hinted at the answer already—but why have things changed so much? 

Marty: Well, I think there’s probably aspects to that that are sort of political in their origins, but I think a lot of what has changed was sort of social and economic conditions that then have impacted our politics.

I guess I’d point to a few things. So, in terms of economics, you know, there’s been huge changes since the 1950s. During the 1950s, you know, it was a time of job growth, and income growth, partly as a result of government policies. And that then started to change. 

And it changed, in part, due to broader phenomena. So, after World War II, you know, the U. S. in the immediate postwar period was kind of protected from economic competition from other countries. Ae emerged as, you know, clearly the strongest both militarily and economic country in the world.

But that, of course, began to erode over time as other countries emerged from the effects of World War II. And then technology and increased foreign trade kind of undermined the growth of industrial jobs in America. And then later, in the early 2000s, [there was] the so-called “China shock,” where China was admitted to the World Trade Organization, and imports in the U. S. and globally from China increased dramatically.

So as a result, the economic conditions changed rather dramatically and in negative ways for, you know, sort of average citizens, 

At the same time, we saw a lot of social changes on top of that, right? So we became a more inclusive society in many ways, right, with the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the gay rights movement, increased immigration, like, starting in the 1960s. You know, all of these things made us—I would argue a better—but certainly a more inclusive society.

But also generated backlash, right, among the groups that felt threatened by those changes. And I think Trump has, you know—clearly, he wasn’t the first within the Republican Party, which has, you know, over decades now, kind of, you know, embraced that backlash to that kind of diversity and inclusion. But clearly, you know, Trump has kind of raised that to a new level. So a variety of social changes. 

And then on top of both the economic and social changes were a series of events that kind of undermined people’s trust in government. So, we had Watergate, Vietnam—where the Johnson administration had been telling people, you know, we’re on the verge of winning the war, and then, it became clear that, um, we were certainly not on the verge of winning the war.

You know, I think all of those things, you know, changed the nature of our politics and undermine people’s trust in institutions more broadly. 

And the two parties responded in different ways to those changes. So, whereas, Republicans and the Democrats both seemed to—at least to a degree—embrace the notion of government working to improve the lives of ordinary citizens in the 1950s and early 1960s, but as conditions changed, the Republican Party became more the party of, you know, white Americans, more the party of the affluent and of business, and the Democrats became more the party of labor and of unions, and the party that embraced social inclusion rather than pushed back against it.

Lindsay: I want to ask you to dig in a little more to the growing—you know, the economic inequality piece of that story. You talked about some of the pressures on the American workforce that came about because of globalization. You know, blue-collar workers are not just competing anymore with each other, they’re competing with blue-collar workers all over the world for jobs. Some of those jobs are getting automated. 

You mentioned unions, you know, I remember my grandpa was a strong Democrat, union guy, construction worker. And the unions don’t have—I don’t think—any of the power that they used to.

Help us understand what that has looked like. And I’m curious, you know, if you can benchmark that for us a little bit against what’s happening in other kind of peer countries. Are we kind of an outlier in this story? Or is this a story that we’re just seeing everywhere?

Marty: You know, I think one thing to say is that the sort of broader economic forces that, you know, we’ve been discussing that America has faced are not unique to the United States. 

So technological change and global trade, you know, these are things that all advanced democracies have had to face. Where America is unique is how we’ve responded to those forces politically. 

And so, in, like, most European democracies, we see over the last, say, 40 or 50 years that social programs have been adopted and strengthened in order to kind of compensate for some of those forces which otherwise have generated increasing inequality and undermined, you know, living conditions and wages for less well-off workers.

Where in the United States, we’ve experienced more and more inequality to the point where it has now exceeded the highest levels of inequality ever recorded in this country, even from the Gilded Age.

Lindsay: Really?

Marty: Absolutely.

There certainly over the long run has been a great deal of economic growth in this country since the 1970s, but the benefits of that growth have gone primarily, to the top, you know, 10 percent, the top one percent, and increasingly to the top fraction-of-one percent. So, the very rich have done incredibly well, but they’ve done it by sort of gathering for themselves, if you will, the benefits of that economic growth. 

Lindsay: So, a workforce in the United States that has been dealt some blows in the global economy over the last several decades, a social safety net that is fairly anemic and getting more and more so—we’re a democracy, we tax our citizens and we redistribute that money for our collective good, but a lot of that redistribution has gone upwards rather than down, as you said.

Why is this happening? What’s going on in our body politic that is driving this problem?

Marty: I mean, my focus has been on money and politics, and I do think that between the outsized role of money in American politics and the role of lobbying—which is a related, but sort of distinct problem in our political system —that government has just has not been pressured sufficiently to respond to the needs of the average citizens, but is pressured to respond to the needs of business and the well off. And that clearly has gotten worse over time as the sources of money in our elections have become more and more concentrated. 

So, ironically—and frankly to my surprise, despite, you know, the rise of the Internet and sort of what’s sometimes called small-donor democracy, more and more of the money in our elections comes from fewer and fewer people.

And so if you go back historically to the 1980s—a political scientist at Stanford, Adam Bonica, has done great work on this. And he documents how in the 1980s, only about 10 percent of the money in federal elections came from the very teeny sliver at the top of American households. About one-tenth-of-one-tenth-of-one percent. So that’s a teeny, teeny fraction of Americans. They contributed about 10 percent of all the money in elections, which was of course much larger than their share of the population. 

But by the 2010s, that same teeny, teeny sliver was contributing 40 percent of all the money spent in federal elections. And it’s likely gone up since then. So billionaires have become an enormous influence in our political life, along with interest groups, which are not exclusively—but which are primarily business oriented and pursuing the interests of American business.

And so, our policy has, along many dimensions—whether it’s regulation, taxation, and so on—shifted in ways that are beneficial to business, and to owners, and to the rich, and harmful to the middle class and to the poor.

Lindsay: Well, so I’m curious: a lot of us have in our heads—you know, casual people who pay attention to the news—Citizens United in 2012 as being a really important kind of landmark Supreme Court decision that had pretty significant implications for money and politics. What did that do? And again, I think most of us don’t have, like, really any conception of how elections are financed anywhere else—can you explain to us how different this is from everywhere else?

Marty: So, you know, Americans have been concerned about the role of money in politics for a long time. And the first efforts at the federal level to constrain the role of, you know, campaign contributions and—and—and money, you know, was—is over 100 years old now. But the Supreme Court has a long history of striking down the constraints that Congress has tried to put on money in elections.

And that did start in the ‘60s and ‘70s. And certainly Citizens United is part of that tradition. And some of that has been sort of based on the notion that money is speech.

But yeah, the United States is pretty unique, in terms of both the amount of money we spend on elections, and the source of that money coming almost exclusively through private contributions.

So, there’s a wide range of ways that democracies fund elections. The sort of most extreme other end of that spectrum would be, like, Scandinavian democracies, for example, that virtually all of the money in elections is public money. So it’s typically—these are party-based systems where people are voting for parties rather than candidates.

The parties get money from the government based on either their voting support in the previous elections or their membership, and it’s much less money. There’s constraints on what they can do with that money. And elections are just extremely different.

There’s a lot of countries, European democracies, that are somewhere in between the United States and that sort of fully publicly funded model.

So places like France, Germany, have some mix of sort of public and private contributions. But typically also much more constraints on what candidates and parties can do with that money. 

So again, partly because of, you know, our First Amendment concerns, the ability of the government to constrain what a candidate can use the money for—you know, things like whether they can buy television ads, or, you know, use money in other ways to promote or to attack a candidate—is virtually unheard of in the United States. Whereas other countries do sort of police those kinds of things and channel electoral funds into, you know, ways that they think are more socially beneficial.

Lindsay: So you’ve described a history—so clearly and so succinctly—of decades of steady accretion of more and more megabucks in—in our elections, fewer and fewer rules about how that money is spent or regulated, growing economic inequality, a workforce that is increasingly vulnerable, low paid— powerless in some respects, and ordinary citizens are not really represented. What does this do to our democracy?

Marty: I think it undermines people’s faith that their system is not—not only that their system is working for them, but that their system can work for them. 

So when people see decade after decade that elections seem to have no impact in their lives, that we’re unable as a political system to address ongoing problems, whether it’s—you know, problems of funding our healthcare, or the accessibility of education, to address global warming, you know, people lose faith in democracy as a system. Or at the very least, are willing to consider that we’ve reached a point where a fundamental shakeup of our political system is worth the risk.

And that’s where I see the greatest risk to our country is, that the conclusion that people—not unreasonably—draw from the lack of responsiveness of government to their needs is that—just, let’s go for something else. Like maybe they think, you know, Trump or some other sort of autocratic, transformational candidate has a downside, and has some risks, and may have things they don’t like, but the system isn’t working for them, so—you know, let’s give it a try.

And I think we see that in many European democracies as well.

Lindsay:  You have been studying the politics of inequality for many years. You’ve written volumes on the subject. You were interviewed on The Daily Show about it. You’ve made a big splash. How did you become interested in this topic? Like, what is your origin story in this space?

Marty: You know, for most of human history, most people have struggled just to have enough food, you know, shelter, to keep their children alive. And in some places, you know, most people still do. 

But in places like the United States, we have historically unimaginable wealth. And we could end hunger and homelessness and provide healthcare for everybody. But we don’t. And the question is: why? 

Like, why does a country as rich in resources as ours still have so much suffering? And most of my research, which uses, like, quantitative analysis of survey data, is sort of focused on one or another aspect of that question.

So I look at things like: who shapes public policy? What are the forces that determine the decisions that our policymakers make? What is it that citizens want? And especially in the case of my work, how do racial and economic inequalities contribute to and help shape our political outcomes? 

Lindsay: There’s a lot of cynicism. And as your research suggests, there are reasons to be skeptical, there are reasons to be cynical, to feel some—some despair or dismay. 

And one of the questions that we’re thinking about over the course of all of these five episodes in the series is the question: is democracy worth saving? And if it is—and I’m guessing that you’re going to say it is—why? Why for you personally? 

I don’t know that voters are sitting around their living room, you know, asking themselves this question, but this election does feel that important. And so, for you personally, you know, why—why is it worth hanging in for democracy?

Marty: Yeah, I agree this election—it does feel like democracy may be kind of hanging in the balance. Well, I mean, what is democracy, right? 

One part of it is the responsiveness of government to the preferences of the citizens, as we’ve been talking about. But it’s also, you know, freedom of speech. It’s freedom of the press. It’s having an independent judiciary, right, where the courts are not, like, dominated and controlled by the party or the people who are in power. It’s having fair elections. It’s having a fair rule of law that’s applied equally to everyone. Well, America is imperfect in all of those ways, all of those aspects of democracy, and maybe most imperfect in terms of political equality, like we’ve been talking about and my work addresses. And in terms of the equal application of the rule of law, and there I’m thinking about the very evident racism within our criminal legal system.

But if you look at non-democratic governments, right—authoritarian governments like in Russia or China, theocracies like Iran, then citizens have much fewer rights, right? They don’t have freedom of speech. There is no free press. There’s no independent judiciary, right? Their courts are politicized. 

So, democracy, even if imperfect, and even with a lack of responsiveness or a lack of equal responsiveness to the needs of ordinary citizens, it’s still far better than any alternative. And the consequences of going down an authoritarian, undemocratic path are just so dire that I think it’s right to be concerned, it’s right to be worried. I think, in order to avoid that, we need to improve our democracy in order to keep our democracy.

Lindsay: Marty, such a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much for being with us on Talking Policy. Absolute pleasure.

Marty: My pleasure, Lindsay, thanks for having me.

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Outro

In our next episode, we’ll talk with Zoltan Hajnal, a professor of political science UC San Diego, about the tactics that seek to turn one group against another for political gain. 

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Credits

Thanks for listening to “Democracy and Its Discontents,” a special miniseries from Talking Policy. I’m your host, Lindsay Shingler. 

Our production partner for this miniseries is CitizenRacecar. This episode was produced by Anna Van Dine. Mixing and sound design by Alex Brouwer. Special thanks to Erika Snell at UCLA. 

Talking Policy is a production of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at the University of California. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

 

The UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) is a research network comprised of scholars from across the University of California and the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories that conducts policy-relevant research to mitigate conflict and promote a more peaceful world order. Our focus is on challenges that have the potential to lead to wide-scale conflict, and that can benefit from global cooperation to solve. Our portfolio includes both traditional security issues—defense innovation, strategy and deterrence, nuclear weapons policy, and security cooperation—and emerging and non-traditional challenges such as climate change, geoeconomics and great power competition, and threats to democracy. In each of these areas, IGCC builds diverse, multidisciplinary research teams that analyze the causes and consequences of global conflict—and help develop practical solutions.