Growing economic inequalities in the United States have proved to be an inexhaustible source of fodder for pundits and public intellectuals. In this timely and important new book, Martin Gilens presents new metrics for weighing the impact of economic inequality on policy outcomes. In the process, Gilens introduces a good deal of clarity into public and scholarly conversation on inequality in the US.

This is not a study of racial, sexual, or other forms of inequality. Instead, Gilens focusses his attention exclusively on the preferences of citizens of different income levels and the association between these preferences and policy outcomes. To gauge public preferences, he aggregated questions from a range of surveys posing specific policy changes to respondents (57). He then assessed whether or not these policy measures were enacted within four years of the date of the survey question (60).

Gilens's study yields some very noteworthy findings: taking all of the policy issues in his dataset together, he found that there is nearly no relationship whatsoever between policy outcomes and the policy preferences of low- and median-income voters (80–81). Contrary to the pattern identified in other comparable polities, the policy preferences of poorer and middle-class Americans had very little impact on policy outcomes when these preferences were aligned, but opposed by more affluent Americans (83–85).

Dividing the dataset of policy questions into four issue domains (foreign policy/national security, social welfare, economic policy, and moral/religious issues), he finds the lowest levels of representative inequality on matters of social welfare (103). Gilens attributes the relatively equitable levels of responsiveness in this domain to the strength of interest groups that have successfully thwarted the rollback of social welfare programs widely supported by the less affluent.

Gilens also arrives at a rather unexpected conclusion: he finds that the policy preferences of less affluent Americans are better represented when Republicans are in power. This he attributes to the convergence of opinion between Republican activists and the broader profile of preferences among lower-income Americans, who tend to be socially conservative, “hawkish” on matters of foreign policy, and favorably disposed toward tax cuts (despite their support for social welfare programs).

Gilens's approach to the study of representation is innovative. Unlike many previous studies that sought to link constituent preferences with their legislators' roll call votes, this study examines the relationship between what citizens of different income groups want and actual policy changes passed by Congress and signed by the President. To readers unfamiliar with the political-science literature on representation, this may not seem so ambitious. But the task of defining “policy change” for the purposes of a quantitative study is no simple matter. Gilens, in fact, does run into some difficulties as he attempts a usable definition. Indeed, he seems to falter when he tries to quantitatively accommodate the grey area between “successful” policy adoption and the “failure” to adopt policy.

Policy reforms are, more often than not, qualified achievements. The successful adoption of a policy or the failure to adopt cannot be coded as a one or a zero, respectively, without misrepresenting the nature of the legislative accomplishment (or lack thereof). Gilens acknowledges this, but does not seem to incorporate the nuance of lawmaking “success” or “failure” into his model. His dataset, in fact, yields surprisingly few “partial [policy] changes” – only 3 percent of all policy outcomes fall into this category; Gilens, moreover, does not include these results in his analysis and neglects to explain why (60). This difficulty by no means invalidates the broader findings of his study; indeed, the policy proposals he examines are sufficiently specific to minimize the problem. The proposals he considers are intelligible as policies that have been discretely adopted (or not). Nonetheless, more work needs to be done by scholars of representation to discriminate between significant policy accomplishments and symbolic gestures that do not result in meaningful change.

Scholars and pundits will continue to debate the role of democratic equality in a modern system of representative government. A fair assessment of this normative question, nonetheless, requires a sober-minded analysis of the responsiveness of existing governing institutions in the United States. Gilens's clear and accessible analysis addresses this empirical demand, and, in so doing, offers a valuable contribution to the ongoing normative debate.