ABSTRACT
Over the past several decades, students of political participation have provided a wealth of evidence that inequalities in resources translate into unequal participation in the political process. But with a few noteworthy exceptions, American politics scholars have not taken the next step of demonstrating the conditions under which such inequalities in participation affect policy outcomes. While scattered work suggests that the potential impact is substantial-such as Larry Bartels’ research demonstrating that senators are much more responsive to high-income constituents than to low-income constituents-legislative scholars have not, as a whole, taken up the challenge of assessing how inequalities in turnout, campaign contributions, and other forms of activism affect the laws produced by Congress. One reason is that studies of mass behavior and legislative politics have for the most part been treated as entirely separate fiefdoms in American politics. Partly as a result, the leading models that we use to understand lawmaking say remarkably little about the mass “input” side, beyond the information that can be summarized in the location of the median voter in the electorate and perhaps the median voter in the majority party. This is not a call for attempting to demonstrate that policies are consistently distorted by income inequalities. After all, on many issues, income is uncorrelated with mass opinion. Nonetheless, better integrating mass behavior into the study of legislative politics will enrich out understanding of core features of democratic accountability in the United States.
