US History 1973 - 2014 Commonplace Book: Lecture 32, America in 2014: Inequality (Con't)

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule -- at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.... [O]ur analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

— Martin Gillens & Benjamin I. Page, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" (forthcoming, Fall, 2014)

Introduction to (and explanation of) this quote series can be found here.  Read this tag to see all of them.