1/7/2024 0 Comments Democracy 3 electioneering![]() For aspiring reformers, Bartels and his colleagues provide a bracing reality check. The volume suggests that, as a result, prospective voters in 1996 knew more about the candidates’ issue positions than in any presidential election in decades, yet turnout and public faith in the electoral process continued to decline. Indeed, candidates in their advertisements and speeches focus more on policy and less on strategy and process than any major news outlet, including the New York Times. For example, “attack” advertisements prove to be no more effective than self-promotional advertisements, but are more substantive. Some of their conclusions will be startling to campaigners and critics alike. These scholars probe the reality behind the conventional wisdom that nasty, vacuous campaigns dominated by big money and cynical media coverage are perverting our political process and alienating our citizenry. What is wrong with American political campaigns? How could the campaign process be improved? This volume brings the expertise of leading political scientists to the public debate about campaign reform. Finally, he challenges conventional explanations for why many voters seem to vote against their own economic interests, contending that working-class voters have not been lured into the Republican camp by “values issues” like abortion and gay marriage, as commonly believed, but that Republican presidents have been remarkably successful in timing income growth to cater to short-sighted voters.Ĭampaign Reform: Insights and Evidence (ed., with Lynn Vavreck). He provides revealing case studies of key policy shifts contributing to inequality, including the massive Bush tax cuts of 20 and the erosion of the minimum wage. He shows that Republican presidents in particular have consistently produced much less income growth for middle-class and working-poor families than for affluent families, greatly increasing inequality. This is not simply the result of economic forces, but the product of broad-reaching policy choices in a political system dominated by partisan ideologies and the interests of the wealthy.īartels demonstrates that elected officials respond to the views of affluent constituents but ignore the views of poor people. Larry Bartels shows the gap between the rich and poor has increased greatly under Republican administrations and decreased slightly under Democrats, leaving America grossly unequal. ![]() Using a vast swath of data spanning the past six decades, Unequal Democracy debunks many myths about politics in contemporary America, using the widening gap between the rich and the poor to shed disturbing light on the workings of American democracy. Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.
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