Inequality, American Democracy, and American Political Science: The Need for Cumulative Research

by Jacob S. Hacker, Yale University The members of the Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy were not of one mind about any of the subjects they took up and this is one reason, among many, that it was the most vibrant and stimulating professional collaboration I have had the privilege to be part of. It would be presumptuous of me to speak for anyone but myself in explaining and justifying the Task Force's work. And yet, there does seem to me at least one note of common explanation required up front. All the members of the Task Force, I am certain, saw their work as only the beginning of a discussion within the discipline-and, indeed, more broadly about the relationship between inequality and contemporary American governance. Although we hoped to showcase and integrate the best existing research and theory, our main goal was to spark new questions, new research, new thinking, and new debates. And judging from this forum, as well as from the recent scholar ship showcased in Larry Bartels's (2006) and Kay Schlozman's (2006) essays, we have. Political equality is at the heart of democ racy. Economic inequal ity threatens political equality. And good re search on the extent to which economic in equality actually com promises political equality is needed. These three convictions were, to my mind, the agreed-upon common denominators that animated the Task Force's deliberations. Frances Fox Piven (2006), in her spirited but ultimately sympathetic chiding of the Task Force as "timid," says that the trends documented by the Task Force represent "nor mal politics in the United States." By trying to fit its conclusions into the "familiar mold" of citizen participation and representation, she argues, the Task Force missed a more insidious threat to American democracy-the Republican "political machine" that controls all three branches of government today. A reading of the other responses in this forum makes clear, of course, that even the "familiar" concerns expressed by the Task Force are not universally shared. More impor tant, as the report of the Task Force suggests and as the Task Force's edited book, Inequality and American Democracy (Jacobs and Skocpol 2005), documents in considerable detail surprisingly little research and theorizing di rectly addresses the crucial question of how political equality is affected by the recent dra matic rise in economic inequality in the United States. Nor does the important yet limited scholarship that is available indicate that the mounting threats to American democracy dis cussed by the Task Force are merely "normal politics." Against the backdrop of the much less economically unequal era immediately after World War II, the recent dynamics of American politics point to a substantial decline in the responsiveness of political elites to citi zens of modest economic means, as well as a hardening of the longstanding divide in partici pation, organizational clout, and influence be tween the well off and the rest. These worrisome conclusions are perhaps most clear, I must add, in the extensive por tions of the Task Force materials that go be yond citizen participation to consider processes of governance and relationships of influence. No fair reader of the report, for example, could accuse the Task Force of being complacent about the potentially distorting influence of lobbyists and moneyed interests, or about the declining congruence between public policy and the expressed demands of citizens. The report's bottom line is there for all to see: Something is rotten in the state of American politics. If the members of the Task Force were "timid," as Piven accuses, we were so only in the appropriate sense that we were restrained by the limited state of current knowledge. I share a number of the specific concerns voiced by Piven about the recent efforts of Republi cans to limit political responsiveness and elec toral accountability. (Indeed, along with Paul Pierson, I have just written a book that argues that the elite-level shift to the right in Ameri can politics has pulled policymaking away from a largely moderate public (Hacker and Pierson 2005).) Others on the Task Force may well share some of these concerns. But I can assure Piven that the choice of what to discuss or present was not restrained by any explicit or implicit constraints. Any restraint on our part and, again, some clearly do not see the report as all that restrained-was instead based on the conviction that scholars acting in a professional capacity should not delve far afield from the available evidence and research. Such timidity, if that is what it should be called, is the es sence of the social sciences. Another guiding conviction of the social sci ences is that claims about how the world works should be clear about the causal mechanisms at play and careful in testing the observable