Vol. 16 No. 9 (September, 2006) pp.746-750

 

INEQUALITY AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: WHAT WE KNOW AND WHAT WE NEED TO LEARN, by Lawrence R. Jacobs and Theda Skocpol (eds). New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005.. 256pp. Hardcover. $37.50. ISBN: 0-87154-413-X.

 

Reviewed by Tracy Lightcap, Department of Political Science, LaGrange College. E-mail: tlightcap [at] lagrange.edu.

 

Back in 2000, I was one of the signatories of an open letter published in PS sent in reaction to the now famous “Mr. Perestroika” e-mail calling for reform in the American Political Science Association and a new focus for the AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW (hereinafter APSA and APSR). Aside from governance issues in the APSA, at that time I had two overriding concerns for my profession. The first was widely shared by other scholars who signed the open letter. Like them, I was nonplussed by the lack of diversity of approaches and the often esoteric nature of articles published in the APSR. While, unlike some, I did not think that the “big questions” were being avoided altogether, I felt that some of the research presented in the journal was trying to kill substantive mice with quantitative or “rational choice” elephant guns.

 

I had another concern as well, one of which I suspect many of the others who signed the letter did not share. Although almost all of my research is quantitative, I was disturbed by a trend relegating empirical work to the sidelines in favor of “positive theory.” I had always thought of political science as what Freeman Dyson calls a “Manchesterian” science; i.e. non-experimental, historically contingent, and based on inductive descriptions that yield narrative theories grounded on probabilistic relationships. I thought that most of the good quantitative work I had seen in political science down through the years had been built on this model. The partial – it was never more – retreat I saw from letting the data drive theoretical advances gave me pause. 

 

But that was then, and this is now. The book I am reviewing here shows how very much has changed in the best of political science scholarship since that time. This volume is a revised version of the report of the APSA Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy. Their report has already been the subject of widespread praise by many political scientists that share my continuing concerns about the profession’s direction. It is, not to put to fine a point on it, exactly what I was hoping would result from calling on political science to become a “post-autistic” discipline.

 

As most readers will know, the Task Force had a charge that is simple enough to state and horrendously difficult to fulfill: find out what existing research can tell us about the effect rising economic inequality has had on how democracy works in the United States. To begin to answer this question, Lawrence Jacobs and Theda Skocpol, the Task Force co-chairs, created three working groups to look into the effects [*747] of inequality on political voice (Kay Lehman Schlozman, Benjamin Page, Sidney Verba, and Morris Fiorina), governance (Larry Bartels, Hugh Heclo, Rodney Hero, and Lawrence Jacobs), and public policy (Jacob Hacker, Suzanne Mettler, and Dianne Pinderhughes). The executive summary and recommendations of the Task Force have been published in PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICS already along with critiques both there and in PS. Further, earlier versions of each working group’s reports have been available online for some time. INEQUALITY AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY revises these initial efforts, presents them as a coherent whole, and sets out a research agenda for the future. Given the extensive attention already given the findings reported in the book, I will not rehash them here. To do so would require an essay considerably beyond the constraints of this review and my expertise. Instead, I will present four reasons why I think INEQUALITY AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY is a template for good practice in political science today.

 

First, all aspects of the Task Force’s work tied normative concerns to empirical research. Or, to be slightly more blunt, the interpretations of research presented here are interesting for reasons that have public resonance. Each of the working groups gives us normative reasons why we should care about their analysis. The political voice group, for instance, begins its deliberations with a description of some well known aspects of public opinion concerning inequality, then immediately addresses the question of why one should be concerned about political participation and its effects on democracy. By tying together perspectives concerning the desirability of equal political voice, the difficulties of determining public choice given unequal participation, and the advantages greater resources convey for successful collective action, the actual value dilemmas involved in inequalities of voice are clearly delineated. Similar considerations are made concerning governance by using Pitkin’s typology of representation to evaluate institutional responsiveness and concerning public policy by looking to the contrast between the “rights revolution” and policy decisions. One can see the authors of the reports struggling with true public problems and taking the normative aspects of research seriously without at the same time becoming either tendentious or too sure of themselves.

 

The second aspect of INEQUALITY AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY that I found refreshing was the willingness of the authors to study feedback effects. The central concern of the editors of the report is the contradiction between the startling advances in political equality and the equally startling increases in economic inequality found in the United States during the last quarter of the 20th century. Analyzing the aspects of this contradiction in different areas of concern to the working groups leads to even more emphasis on the need to look into the knots in our political process. The working group on governance has provided us with a good example of this kind of analysis. As they point out, American political parties have experienced resurgence in the electorate [*748] and appear to have become more “responsible,” as many have called for in the past. However, this new ideological coherence has had a feedback effect; it has contributed to economic inequality. More ideologically coherent Republican elites have become more attentive than ever to policies that transfer income to the upper end of the income scale. Further, Democrats have become more sympathetic to these transfers over time as they adapt to a political environment dominated by a conservative consensus, a consensus created and nurtured by feedback from the initial policy decisions. Further expositions of this kind of dialectic analysis can be found, for instance, in the treatment of the decline in participation in voluntary associations and its effect on participation by political moderates in the report of the political voice group or in the policy group’s case study of how the War on Poverty simultaneously increased economic equality and created a backlash against activist government. 

 

Third, INEQUALITY AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY is characterized throughout by clear presentations of data and a willingness to use multiple approaches to analysis. The data displays and tables all meet the criteria of Tukey’s Inter-Occular Trauma Test (i.e. the results hit you between the eyes). As a consequence, the graphs are thankfully free of chart-junk, and the tables, of superfluous inferential and descriptive statistics. I have not seen a clearer or more efficient presentation of supporting data since I read the Coleman Report for the first time. Equally impressive is the willingness of all involved to embrace different approaches. Here perhaps the exemplar is the report of the public policy working group. Their analysis is hampered by a lack of data generally addressing the feedback effects of public policy on economic and political inequality. Rather than throw up their hands, these scholars instead turn to a series of historical case studies (G.I. Bill, Social Security, and so on), showing clear evidence of the way that changes in the policy environment create, often at the same time, positive and negative feedback loops over time that have substantial effects on both political participation and economic inequality. Similarly innovative approaches can be found in the working group on political voice’s use of counterfactuals to analyze the effects of inequality on interest group participation or the interesting juxtaposition of studies of responsiveness of political elites at both the state and federal level in the governance group’s chapter.

 

Finally, INEQUALITY AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY is characterized by a determined refusal to theorize in advance of the data. Indeed, if one were to gather anything from the working group reports, it would be that an immense amount of work remains to be done and that theory to guide that work so far has not advanced beyond some limited medium-range models. When Jacobs and Skocpol review the findings in the working group reports in the book’s last chapter, almost the entire emphasis of their treatment is on the continuing gaps in our knowledge about important aspects of the effects of economic inequality on American politics. Rather then pat political [*749] scientists on their collective backs, they point out that, among other things, intensive study is needed of the impact of changes in income distribution on participation over time, of how campaign contributions affect legislative behavior off the floor, or of how the “hidden welfare state” (i.e., welfare benefits delivered through subsidies to private actors rather than directly by the state) affects citizen perceptions of government. All these recommendations and others are tied to calls for more sophisticated methods of investigation – panel studies, analytical narratives, the revival of ethnographic studies, the need to incorporate international dimensions into research designs – to answer the empirical questions first, building theory as the data show us avenues to it.

 

As you can see, I think INEQUALITY AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY is important and worth reading. We have our work cut out for us in studying inequality and its effects on our democracy. I found it a heartening, thought daunting, experience to read this book. That is, however, exactly the kind of experience I think political science needs today. Political science, as a discipline, is at what I have called the “Humphrey Davy stage” of development. In the early years of the 19th century, Davy was the first successful research chemist. He is remembered today not for his theoretical insights, but because his research, relentlessly empirical in nature, cleared the ground for subsequent work by laying out clearly which relationships could be supported and, hence, were worth theorizing about. That is the kind of endeavor outlined in INEQUALITY AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, and it is, I believe, exactly what we need to make political science better grounded and more useful.

 

INEQUALITY AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY is more than a research agenda, however. The APSA has put useful ancillaries – a framework for graduate and undergraduate syllabi and a sample undergraduate syllabus – on the Task Force website (www.apsanet.org/content_4032.cfm) and is making attempts to collect additional materials. I think the book would be excellent as a research review and general backgrounder for courses at both levels on inequality and politics in the United States.

 

There is always something you wish had been included, even in books you find interesting and useful. That is the case here as well. “American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality,” the Task Force’s report to the APSA, ends with some recommendations about what to do about the difficulties they see for American democracy in the future. In many ways, those recommendations are the most interesting and controversial aspect of the report. I wish the Task Force had decided to link the research agenda laid out in INEQUALITY AND AMERICAN DEMOCRACY with the recommendations made in their report. It would have been enlightening to see what a group of such imminent scholars see as the most useful research paths to validate their proposed answers to our present conundrums. But perhaps it is unfair to criticize authors for a book they never intended to write. Their efforts here indicate to me that, despite some continuing [*750] concerns, there are real signs that the discipline has righted itself.

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© Copyright 2006 by the author, Tracy Lightcap.