Top-10-percent income earners’ policy preferences correlate at r=.91 with the top 2 percent’s.

Evidence

Some evidence for this proposition comes from the 2011 Cooperative Congressional Election Study. Based on 13 policy-preference questions asked on this survey, the preferences of the top 2 percent of income earners (a group that might be thought “truly wealthy”) are much more highly correlated with the preferences of the top 10 percent of earners than with the preferences of the average survey respondent (r5.91 versus .69). Thus, the views of our moderately high-income “affluent” respondents appear to capture useful information about the views of the truly wealthy. — Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, Testing Theories of American Politics, 57

Categorization

• XREF: Core empirical instrument for the reader’s question: validates that 90th-percentile preferences track the truly wealthy (top 2%), the premise of the economic-elite test.