Who Gets Represented?

One person, one vote the bedrock principle of a democratic society does not require the government to represent the interests of all citizens equally. While it is evident that policymakers favor the interests of some citizens at the expense of others, it is not always evident when and how groups interests differ or what it means when they do. Who Gets Represented? challenges the usual assumption that the preferences of any one group women, African Americans, or the middle class are incompatible with the preferences of other groups. Taking unequal representation as a given, the book analyzes differences across income, education, racial, and partisan groups and investigates whether and how differences in group opinion matter with regard to political representation.

Part I examines opinions among social and racial groups. Contributor Katherine Cramer Walsh finds that, although preferences on health care policy and government intervention vary little between middle- and lower-income groups, different income groups can maintain the same policy preferences for different reasons. Opposition to a newly passed statute, for example, may galvanize upper-income people to become more involved in a political system they view as basically viable while lower-income people may simply feel that their needs aren t being met. The perception of unequal representation, Wash points out, is self-perpetuating. Marisa Abrajano and Keith Poole link respondents in different surveys to show that racial and ethnic groups do not, as previously thought, predictably embrace similar attitudes about social welfare, and this may be because social class interests sometimes trump racial interests. Analysts often assume, for example, that Latinos and African Americans share similar opinions on social and political matters or that Asians and African Americans rarely do. Not always so, Abrajano and Poole find, as blacks and Asians similarly support increased federal spending on the provision of goods and services while Latinos do not. Part II turns to how group interests translate into policy outcomes, with a focus on differences in representation between income groups. James Druckman and Lawrence Jacobs analyze Ronald Reagan s response to private polling data during his presidency and show how different electorally significant groups Republicans, the wealthy, religious conservatives wielded disproportionate influence on Reagan s policy positions. Martin Gilens finds that, with regard to government policy, the views of the wealthy outweigh those of the poor. Significantly, Gilens shows that this unequal representation pervades most policy issues from national security to abortion rights. Inequality in representation, he concludes, correlates with income inequality. In contrast, Christopher Wlezien and Stuart Soroka argue that politicians responsiveness to the needs of constituents within different income groups not only changes over time but also can be surprisingly equal.

Political scientists Peter Enns and Christopher Wlezien point out early in the book that citizens should rarely expect policy to match their own policy preferences. Who Gets Represented? nevertheless confirms that group interests matter in political representation and investigates how they matter. The book upends several long-held assumptions, among them that certain groups will always or will never have common interests. Similarities among group opinions are as significant as differences for understanding political representation. As such, Who Gets Represented? is a rigorous addition to the study of public policy and political inequality.