Authors:

  • Torben Iversen

Excerpt

The Political Representation of Economic Interests: Subversion of Democracy or Middle-Class Supremacy? Torben Iversen, 2018, Paper, "A new and highly-cited literature on redistribution and economic policy-making paints a gloomy picture of democracy, which we refer to as the Subversion of Democracy Model (SDM). It comes in two varieties. One uses public opinion data to show that policies are strongly biased towards to the preferences of the rich; another uses macrolevel data on inequality and redistribution to show that democratic governments are no longer responding to rising inequality. This paper is a critical reassessment of this literature. We point to methodological and theoretical issues that may bias the results, and we propose solutions that point to a very different interpretation of the data, which we refer to as the Representative Democracy Model (RDM)." Link