Major Study Finds That The US Is An Oligarchy - Business Insider

 An empirical study of American policy making has gotten a lot of press recently.  They looked at "key variables for 1779 policy issues.  Their statistical analysis showed that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests "have substantial independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."  (see here for paper)



As reported in Business Insider, "



Researchers concluded that US government policies rarely align with
the the preferences of the majority of Americans, but do favour special
interests and lobbying organizations: "When a majority of citizens
disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they
generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built
into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of
Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it."  The positions of powerful interest groups are "not substantially
correlated with the preferences of average citizens", but the politics
of average Americans and affluent Americans sometimes does overlap. This
merely a coincidence, the report says, with the the interests of the
average American being served almost exclusively when it also serves
those of the richest 10 per cent.  The theory of "biased pluralism" that the Princeton and Northwestern
researchers believe the US system fits holds that policy outcomes "tend
to tilt towards the wishes of corporations and business and professional
associations."



Major Study Finds That The US Is An Oligarchy - Business Insider