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Even though America may be considered a Democracy, could it be falling into a Plutocracy? In fact, it very much could, A study named “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” (2019) implies and gives evidence to show that it could be a Plutocracy. The evidence given was a database of 1,779 policy issues, which included data on the opinions of median-income Americans, to determine whose opinions correlated most closely with actual government policy. They even took past evidence listing that out of 185 previous bills the wealthy got what they wanted 53% and the middle class got 47% of the time. This matches up that wealthy people are even supportive of public election funding where the rich and middle class agree a lot. But there is also a problem that the definition, Wealthy which may be skewed, as the rich is listed as the 90th percentile of the income distribution.
For example, someone who makes over $160,000 a year is considered wealthy, but they aren’t counted as the wealthy that is mentioned in the studies that the middle class can affect the elections more while the wealthy or the super-wealthy control the top or influence the middle class. As there needs to be a difference in what is exactly an economic elite and a major influence to be considered a Plutocracy, which is what the study covers. The article mentions that from 1981-2002 that the United States government is controlled by groups of wealthy people that hold most of the money and a ton of the power which affects the elections. Even in current times that the 2016 elections were a 1% election where the wealthy of the wealthy put influence on both the middle class and lower classes to get elected, spending millions without remorse as they push ads and campaigns to influence the populace. As stated in the study as:
“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. if they had accurate information about the future unfolding of policy results. Such “latent” preferences are related to the ideal, “authentic” preferences that some political theorists see as superior to, and more worthy of governmental responsiveness than, the policy preferences that citizens actually express. This can be seen as adding normative appeal to an electoral reward-and-punishment system of democratic control.”(2019)
As the United States shows that Populus doesn’t choose how the policy and law-making outcomes, even when majorities of citizens disagree with Economic elites more often then not they lose. Even in simplest terms the record that proves this is that the Wall Street crash in the Great Recession, causing the wealth to be scooped to the nation’s wealthy 10% holding 84% of the stock value. Thes studies show that America is headed towards a full form of Plutocracy that society votes and believes that the government should be ruled by the wealthiest members, from the Political parties spending millions even billions to buy votes via campaigns, the middle-class thining out, and the inequality.
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