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who go against the norm, having large amounts of political interest
and information and adopting their political preferences around logical
ideologies.
When uninformed citizens change their preferences, they do so in an
essentially random way because there is no underlying organizational
principle for these citizens opinions. Highly informed and ideologically
oriented citizens, on the other hand, make predictable and consistent
changes in their issue preferences across a variety of policy domains.
Therefore, any change in aggregate public opinion that is observed
from one time to the next cannot be driven by uninformed citizens
because their opinion changes are random, with one person s random
change canceling out another s random change. Instead, aggregate
opinion change is driven by the highly informed who transmit less
Macro Policy and Distributional Processes 121
error-laden opinions and, thus, carries a meaningful policy signal (the
public mood) that can be communicated through elections. This is why
aggregate preferences on a wide array of domestic policy issues in the
United States move together over time in orderly and predictable ways
despite the true finding that most individual citizens do not possess
orderly and predictable preferences.1
In sum, quantitative analyses of the individual voter in the United
States debunked democratic theory s view of the enlightened citizen,
but the new conceptualization and measurement of public opinion
developed in the macro paradigm rescued democratic theory s view
of the enlightened citizenry. The macro conception of public opinion
forcefully demonstrates that it is theoretically possible for the U.S. elec-
torate to send meaningful policy messages to government officials. At
the aggregate level, public opinion sends an ideologically directed signal
about preferred public policies. When attitudes on one political issue
move toward the ideological left, attitudes on other issues generally
follow a similar path (Stimson 1999).
The macro politics model does not stop by demonstrating that aggre-
gate public opinion projects ideological preferences, but builds on this
fundamental finding by assessing the impact of the public mood on pol-
icymaking. The question is whether the ideological content of public
opinion influences the ideological direction of public policy (Erikson
et al. 2002, Stimson et al. 1995). Using policymaking data from all
three constitutional branches of government, research in the macro pol-
itics tradition shows that when public opinion shifts to the left, public
policy responds in the same direction. For the elected branches of gov-
ernment, this popular influence over policymaking occurs through two
paths. First, elections provide an opportunity for the citizenry to place
like-minded representatives in charge of government. Second, because
of the re-election motive of elected officials, public policy responds
to shifts in public opinion between elections. Interestingly, there is evi-
dence that the decisions of the unelected judicial branch, likely because
of its need to maintain legitimacy with the mass public and elected
1
Enns and Kellstedt (2008) tell a theoretically different story that leads to the same
fundamental conclusion. They show that people at all levels of political sophistication
receive information and change their opinions in similar ways. Under this conception
of macro opinion change, aggregate opinion is perhaps even more meaningful.
122 The Politics of Income Inequality in the United States
officials, is responsive to public opinion (Erikson et al. 2002, McGuire
and Stimson 2004, Stimson et al. 1995).
Research in the macro politics tradition demonstrates that, at the
aggregate level, changes in public opinion produce changes in public
policy. This evidence is used to support the conclusion that the U.S.
governing system provides a large measure of democratic control over
the government  that the U.S. governing system fosters democratic
representation. While this is probably a correct conclusion, it is impor-
tant to remember that democratic control of government is normatively
important largely because of the influence and power that government
wields over society. So, democratic theory is really about more than
determining the policies that government enacts. It is also about the
influence that government has on society through these policies. Ideally,
it is this influence on society that citizens are able to control through
public policy.
While it may be true that aggregate public opinion influences the
course of public policy in the United States, the macro politics model
leaves the question of whether or not changes in public policy produce
changes in societal outcomes largely untested. In the realm of income
inequality, a leftward shift in policy should produce quite different
distributional consequences than a move to the right according to the
macro politics model. If citizens exert influence over public policy, but
public policy does not influence important societal outcomes, then the
importance of the representation for which the macro politics model
finds support is minimized. It is wonderful that citizens influence pub-
lic policy, but this fact matters little if public policy does not exert
systematic influence on societal outcomes over which there is political
contestation. I extend the macro politics model by examining whether
income inequality in the United States has been systematically and pre-
dictably influenced by the ideological direction of public policy during
the post-World War II era.
macro politics, power resources, and the
distributional consequences of policy
While the theoretical emphasis in this chapter is the macro politics
model rather than power resources theory, these theories need not be
viewed in isolation from one another  the analysis of this chapter, in
Macro Policy and Distributional Processes 123
fact, builds directly on the previous chapter. The macro politics model
is broad in its scope of analysis, examining as many aspects of the Amer-
ican governing system as possible. Power resources theory, on the other
hand, is focused on class conflict and distributional outcomes. Despite [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]