Quote:“…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
- Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, 19 November 1863
According to a report by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern University, United States policy is controlled by the economic elite and interest groups, rather than the people. On top of that, the study also found that interest groups overall do not represent American citizens’ preferences.
The peer-reviewed study, “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens,” (PDF) examined 1,779 policy cases between 1981 and 2002.
“Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence,” Gilens and Page report.
“What do our findings say about democracy in America?… When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose.”
The United States is not a democracy, but an oligarchy.
The study will be in the Fall 2014 issue of Perspectives on Politics.
http://freefolkpress.wordpress.com/2014/...democracy/
"Never trust a fox. Looks like a dog, behaves like a cat."
~ Erin Hunter
~ Erin Hunter
