Policy Agendas and Economic Inequality in American Politics
| Published date | 01 November 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321717736951 |
| Author | Derek A Epp |
| Date | 01 November 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717736951
Political Studies
2018, Vol. 66(4) 922 –939
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321717736951
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Policy Agendas and Economic
Inequality in American Politics
Derek A Epp
Abstract
This article investigates the relationship between economic inequality and US congressional
agendas. Longstanding insights into the influence of political spending on public policy suggest
that money can narrow the scope of policy conflicts. I argue that rising inequality should intensify
these negative-agenda forces as wealthy interests gain a political advantage relative to other social
groups and use this advantage to protect their socioeconomic position by donating to candidates
who pursue less disruptive agendas. The expectation is that economic inequality narrows the
purview of policymaking and that this is manifest through a reduction in the diversity of the
congressional agenda. Empirical analysis supports this position. Error-correction models show
that rising inequality is associated with a reduction in the diversity of congressional hearings, bill
introductions, and laws. Moreover, it is legislators who are heavily dependent on deep-pocketed
donors and political action committees that engage with a narrower range of policy topics.
Keywords
congressional agenda, economic inequality, negative-agenda power
Accepted: 22 September 2017
Rising economic inequality in the United States has encouraged a renewed focus on an
old question: How does money influence American politics? Although studies have
largely failed to find a direct link between political spending and policy outcomes
(Ansolabehere et al., 2003; Baumgartner et al., 2009; Witko, 2013), few political scien-
tists argue that money is unimportant in politics. A popular viewpoint is that money is
primarily useful not for buying public policy, but rather for keeping issues off the agenda.
Wealthy interests—by which I refer to the richest Americans, corporations, and business
lobbyists—influence politics through negative-agenda power, so that undesirable policies
do not get passed and undesirable candidates do not get elected.
This idea of money as a tool of agenda suppression is an old one. Famously, it forms
the central thesis of Schattschneider’s (1960) work The Semisovereign People, which
conceives of political power as the ability to limit the scope of conflict. But while the
importance of negative-agenda power has long been recognized, political scientists have
had difficulty studying it empirically. Much like astrophysicists who infer the existence
University of Texas at Austin, USA
Corresponding author:
Derek Epp, University of Texas at Austin, 1505 Concordia Avenue, Austin, TX 78722, USA.
Email: depp@austin.utexas.edu
736951PSX0010.1177/0032321717736951Political StudiesEpp
research-article2017
Article
Epp 923
of dark matter by observing its effects on the surrounding environment, I propose to study
negative-agenda power by looking for context clues. My argument is that rising economic
inequality reduces the scope of policymaking, which can be observed through a reduction
in the issue-level diversity of the congressional agenda, and that this can be taken as evi-
dence for the successful exercise of negative-agenda power by wealthy interests.
This position is explained in more detail in the coming pages, but the basic logic
can be simply stated: Greater economic inequalities further augment the relative abil-
ity of the wealthy to spend on political purposes (Bartels, 2008) and at the same time
reduce lower income groups’ propensity for political engagement (Solt, 2008). Rich
Americans are atypical in that their advantageous socioeconomic positions lead them
to have an unusually strong attachment to the status quo. Conversely, it is lower
income groups that have reasons to prefer a more active, problem-solving government;
one that invests in solutions to the social problems that trouble their lives. As wealthy
interests gain influence and lower income groups drop out of the process, the wealthy
use this comparative advantage to financially support candidates with less disruptive
agendas, thereby intensifying the negative-agenda forces acting on the policy process.
Rather than searching for problems and attempting to solve them, policymakers have
an incentive to behave more myopically, thus reducing the overall diversity of the
congressional agenda.
I test this idea with two observational studies. First, I use campaign finance data
available from the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) for the 2010 and 2012 election
cycles to investigate how legislators’ behavior relates to the type of donations they
receive. I find that legislators who receive more of their funding from large donors and
political action committees (PACs) introduce fewer bills on a narrower range of topics
than their counterparts who raise more money through small donors. Rising inequality
has made members of Congress more reliant on a few ultra-rich donors to fund their
campaigns (Bartels, 2008; Drutman, 2011), so the relationship observed in the first study
suggests a longitudinal dynamic between inequality and the congressional agenda. This
is what the second study tests for using error-correction models (ECMs) to estimate the
relationship between wealth inequality and agenda diversity. Agendas data are available
from the Policy Agendas Project and include annual counts of bill introductions, con-
gressional hearings, and public laws from 1946 to 2012. I find that rising inequality
corresponds with a reduction in the diversity of each of these policy activities. Today, the
spread of congressional attention across issues is substantially more concentrated than in
the 1970s and 1980s. Moreover, I show that this narrowing of the agenda has come at the
expense of attention toward social welfare. This is counterintuitive given welfare’s
potential to mitigate the effects of economic stratification, but consistent with the argu-
ment that wealthy interests use their political influence to promote a more narrowly
focused government that is less concerned with social problems.
This research advances the study of money and politics, showing that the diversity
of congressional agendas is closely linked to society’s distribution of wealth. Previous
studies have approached the question by asking how political spending affects the posi-
tions taken by legislators on policy issues. Results have been equivocal, which lends
credence to the idea that money is primarily a tool of agenda suppression; it is less
about the positions that legislators take than the positions they do not take. This type of
negative-agenda effect is subtle and notoriously difficult for researchers to observe
directly. By focusing on issue attention instead of positioning, this study shifts the focus
to asking how money affects the overall policymaking environment. Money may be of
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