Perspectives on Politics

The finding that the preferences of middle-income Americans are ignored when they diverge from the preferences of the rich is one of the most widely accepted and influential conclusions in political science research today. I […]

Intimate ethnography presents a number of challenges: How could I write about my own family in a way that was true to their experience but also an “objective” report? How could I convey telling details […]

by Sidney Verba The Civic Culture Transformed is an interesting and important volume on political culture, focusing on postmaterialist values and beliefs, their origin, evolution, and relation to functioning democracy. It goes beyond the values […]

Martin Gilens and I agree that because of their similar policy preferences, both median-income and affluent respondents “fairly often get the policies they favor.” We also agree that “democracy by coincidence” can hold normatively concerning […]

by Martin Gilens In “Relative Policy Support and Coincidental Representation,” Peter Enns (2015) focuses on a crucially important question: Given the large disparities in political influence of more and less well-off Americans, “why don’t those in […]

Can the people deliberate to set the agenda for direct democracy in large scale states? How might such an institution work? The 2011 California Deliberative Poll piloted a solution to this problem helping to produce […]

by Kay Lehman Schlozman, Philip Edward Jones, Hye Young You, Traci Burch, Sidney Verba and Henry E. Brady This article documents the prevalence in organized interest politics in the United States of organizations—for example, corporations, think tanks, universities, or hospitals—that have […]