Anti-majoritarian U.S. design creates asymmetric status quo bias
Evidence
A final point: Even in a bivariate, descriptive sense, our evidence indicates that the responsiveness of the U.S. political system when the general public wants government action is severely limited. Because of the impediments to majority rule that were deliberately built into the U.S. political system—federalism, separation of powers, bicameralism—together with further impediments due to anti-majoritarian congressional rules and procedures, the system has a substantial status quo bias. Thus when popular majorities favor the status quo, opposing a given policy change, they are likely to get their way; but when a majority—even a very large majority—of the public favors change, it is not likely to get what it wants. In our 1,779 policy cases, narrow pro-change majorities of the public got the policy changes they wanted only about 30 percent of the time. More strikingly, even overwhelmingly large pro-change majorities, with 80 percent of the public favoring a policy change, got that change only about 43 percent of the time. — Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics, 106
Categorization
- recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source
- XREF: connects to: The U.S. system displays strong status-quo bias against pro-change public majorities.
Related
- Large public majorities favoring policy change lose most of the time. (similarity 0.90)
- The U.S. system displays strong status-quo bias against pro-change public majorities. (similarity 0.86)
- Majorities of citizens lose when elites and organized interests disagree. (similarity 0.83)
- U.S. political institutions structurally hinder majority-driven policy change. (similarity 0.83)
- U.S. policy outcomes contradict majority preferences whenever elites or organized interests disagree (similarity 0.83)