Income Inequality and Policy Representation in the American States

Abstract

Government representation of public opinion is a central component of democracy. Previous studies have documented a robust congruence between aggregated public opinion and public policies in the American states. However, an equally important question for evaluating the quality of democracy is “Who does government respond to when formulating public policies?” I investigate differential policy representation based on citizens’ household incomes and find that citizens with low incomes receive little substantive political representation (compared with more affluent citizens) in the policy decisions made by their state governments. This unequal policy representation occurs for both the general liberalism of state policies and on specific social issues like the death penalty and abortion. These findings suggest that examining the variation in political inequality across the 50 states can help scholars to better understand and explain “unequal democracy” in the United States.