"Your Vote Don't Matter and You Never Get What You Want" Study Says

[hayesc0]

I could have told them this and saved them money lol.

 

[thekingsmen]

Still will vote. Previous generations fought for our right to vote. However miniscule and no matter the voter suppression tactics, it's like not putting a lock on your door and mad when someone opens it instead of putting a lock (doing what you can) and someone kicking it down anyways.

Generations fought to be free men with equal rights not about voting.

 

[Berniewood Hogan]

Remember that study saying America is an oligarchy? 3 rebuttals say it's wrong.

Since its initial release, the Gilens/Page paper's findings have been targeted in three separate debunkings. Cornell professor Peter Enns, recent Princeton PhD graduate Omar Bashir, and a team of three researchers — UT Austin grad student J. Alexander Branham, University of Michigan professor Stuart Soroka, and UT professor Christopher Wlezien — have all taken a look at Gilens and Page's underlying data and found that their analysis doesn't hold up.

THAT HEADLINE ISN'T SENSATIONAL ENOUGH FOR ME, BROTHER!

 

[hayesc0]

No shyt.

The biggest evidence is there is no universal healthcare.

I’ve yet to hear majority of US citizens against it.

It's been proven voters like Obamacare overwhelmingly when you don't call it Obamacare lol. This country is all fukked up politically.

 

[AlainLocke]

Remember that study saying America is an oligarchy? 3 rebuttals say it's wrong.

Since its initial release, the Gilens/Page paper's findings have been targeted in three separate debunkings. Cornell professor Peter Enns, recent Princeton PhD graduate Omar Bashir, and a team of three researchers — UT Austin grad student J. Alexander Branham, University of Michigan professor Stuart Soroka, and UT professor Christopher Wlezien — have all taken a look at Gilens and Page's underlying data and found that their analysis doesn't hold up.

From the article you posted

They also looked at the views of the poor — those at the 10th percentile of the income scale. Here, too, there's lots of agreement. The poor, middle class, and rich agree on 80.2 percent of policies. But here they find more evidence for differences in income-based representation. Bills supported just by the rich but not the poor or middle class passed 38.5 percent of the time, and those supported by just the middle class passed 37.5 percent. But policies supported by the poor and no one else passed a mere 18.6 percent of the time. "These results suggest that the rich and middle are effective at blocking policies that the poor want," the authors conclude.
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I reached out to Gilens and Page to see what they made of the emerging critique of their work, and in particular the one included in the Bashir and Branham/Soroka/Wlezien papers.

Gilens made four main points. First, the definition of "rich" here is "at the 90th percentile of the income distribution." Households at the 90th percentile currently make $160,000 a year. They're rich, for sure, but not superrich. It's impractical to use surveys to measure the opinions of the ultra rich (millionaires, billionaires), but Gilens argues that their opinions would diverge from the middle class more dramatically. That might be, but it's somewhat orthogonal to the claims about the influence of the 90th percentile made in the original Gilens/Page paper.

Second, he insists that the issues where the rich win despite middle-class opposition are important ones relating to redistribution and economic policy. But Branham, Soroka, and Wlezien found that win rates for the rich weren't significantly different between economic and social issues.

Third, he writes that even though the middle class and rich agree on most things, "a political system that responds to the preferences of average citizens is profoundly different from one in which average citizens get their way only when they happen to agree with the preferences of the well to-do." This is a fair point, but again, the average citizen does not only win when they agree with the well-to-do. When they disagree, they win about half the time anyway.

Finally, Gilens argues that the use of "win rates" by Branham, Soroka, and Wlezien is misleading. By focusing on whether majorities of each group support a policy, they ignore gradations in the level of support. He also takes issue with them lumping in wins that consisted of a policy not passing — pretty common in a system with strong status quo bias, like American politics — with ones that consisted of a policy passing, a much rarer event.


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Here's is their rebuttal
Critics argued with our analysis of U.S. political inequality. Here are 5 ways they’re wrong.

 

[HabitualLineSteppa]

Rome.