Citizens can win policies without influencing them when elites agree.

Evidence

It turns out, in fact, that the preferences of average citizens are positively and fairly highly correlated, across issues, with the preferences of economic elites (refer to table 2). Rather often, average citizens and affluent citizens (our proxy for economic elites) want the same things from government. This bivariate correlation affects how we should interpret our later multivariate findings in terms of “winners” and “losers.” It also suggests a reason why serious scholars might keep adhering to both the Majoritarian Electoral Democracy and the Economic-Elite Domination theoretical traditions, even if one of them may be dead wrong in terms of causal impact. Ordinary citizens, for example, might often be observed to “win” (that is, to get their preferred policy outcomes) even if they had no independent effect whatsoever on policy making, if elites (with whom they often agree) actually prevail. — Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics, 75

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely paradigm-shifting interpretive point: observing that the median citizen ‘wins’ is not evidence the citizen had causal influence, since correlated elite preferences could be doing all the work — a standing warning against inferring influence from outcome alignment, across any power analysis.
• XREF: connects to: Ordinary citizens hold little independent influence over U.S. policy

Related

• Ordinary citizens hold little independent influence over U.S. policy (similarity 0.91)
• Average citizens have almost no independent influence over U.S. policy. (similarity 0.88)
• Correlated elite and mass preferences do not reflect citizen influence on policy. (similarity 0.86)
• Average citizens have little independent influence on U.S. policy relative to economic elites. (similarity 0.86)
• U.S. policy outcomes contradict majority preferences whenever elites or organized interests disagree (similarity 0.84)
• Economic elites dominate US policy while average citizens exert little influence (similarity 0.84)
• Majorities of citizens lose when elites and organized interests disagree. (similarity 0.83)
• General public opinion barely moves policy outcomes when elite preferences are held constant. (similarity 0.82)
• Affluent-proxy preferences understate the true gap between elites and ordinary citizens. (similarity 0.81)
• Popular democracy fails when citizen preferences only align by coincidence with real power-holders. (similarity 0.81)
• Most citizens will find any single policy far from their own preference (similarity 0.80)
• Economic elites exert the largest independent influence on U.S. policy. (similarity 0.79)
• Powerful business interest groups actively oppose average citizens’ policy preferences. (similarity 0.79)
• Organized interest-group stances do not substantially track average citizens’ preferences. (similarity 0.79)
• Interest groups shape policy independent of citizen and elite preferences. (similarity 0.79)