The professor will see you now - who gets their way?
Illustration: Tracy Worrall
3 min read
The American political scientist Harold Lasswell famously defined politics as “who gets what, when, how”. Recently, various pieces of research from the United States have demonstrated that the answer to the first part of Lasswell’s question is that policies supported by the rich get implemented more often than those supported by the poor. And a fascinating piece of research just published in the British Journal of Political Science has revealed that the same sort of policy congruence applies in Europe.
The research shows that policies supported by the richest people in Europe (by which they mean those in the top 20 per cent of income) get implemented more often than those supported by the poorest (the bottom 20 per cent). The success rate for the middle 60 per cent of incomes sits – as you might expect – somewhere in the middle.
This is one of those bits of research that sounds easier to do that it actually is. For one thing, you need to find testable survey questions – that is, ones that have asked about things that could have been implemented. You also need data on each respondent’s income. And then you need to check whether each policy was implemented or not. To have tested this, as this recent paper does, with some 3,000 policy proposals is therefore an impressive feat of research.
Yet for all that you might be impressed by the work involved, you might well think the conclusion isn’t especially revelatory. The rich getting their own way? The poor not? To channel Claude Rains in Casablanca: “I’m shocked, shocked”.
Stick with it, though. There are, I think, other things about this work that make it more interesting than the headline. The first is the scale of the difference between the richest and the poorest. It was about three percentage points. That is, changes in policies were supported (on average) by three per cent more of the richest than the poorest citizens. You might be surprised – I know I was – at how small this difference is.
One reason for this, and it’s an interesting finding in itself, is that the views of the richest and the poorest often correlate more than you might think.
Also striking is how consistent this effect is. The researchers found the same effect across the type of issues they examined; across time (the study spans 38 years, with the rich getting their way in 34 of them); and across countries (the poor doing better than the rich in just two out of 21 European countries) – the UK isn’t one of the two.
Over time a consistent three per cent difference is significant. Although it’s not a perfect comparison, a European roulette table has a house advantage of just under three per cent.
Maybe roulette’s not your thing, so let’s try blackjack. If you follow basic strategy (and don’t count cards), the house has a mere 0.5 per cent edge.
You can certainly play and win big at both blackjack and roulette. But over time, if you play enough, there is only one outcome.
And then thirdly, while the effect is consistent in almost every country, the scale of the effect isn’t. The rich get their way more in some European countries than others, and the differences between countries are larger than the differences between the rich and the poor within countries.
To explain these inter-country differences, the paper examines things such as economic inequality, campaign finance regulation, levels of union membership, and voter turnout. And yet it transpires they all make no difference.
For ye have the poor always with you; but not their policy preferences, as it doesn’t quite say in Matthew 26:11.
Your further reading for this week: M Persson and A Sundell, The Rich Have a Slight Edge: Evidence from Comparative Data on Income-Based Inequality in Policy Congruence, British Journal of Political Science, 2023
PoliticsHome Newsletters
Get the inside track on what MPs and Peers are talking about. Sign up to The House's morning email for the latest insight and reaction from Parliamentarians, policy-makers and organisations.
