Economic Inequality and Political Representation
Larry M. Bartels
Department of Politics and
Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs,
Princeton University
bartels@princeton.edu
Revised – August 2005
I examine the differential responsiveness of U.S. senators to the preferences of wealthy, middle-
class, and poor constituents. My analysis includes broad summary measures of senators’ voting
behavior as well as specific votes on the minimum wage, civil rights, government spending, and
abortion. In almost every instance, senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the
opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the
opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent
statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes. Disparities in representation are especially
pronounced for Republican senators, who were more than twice as responsive as Democratic
senators to the ideological views of affluent constituents. These income-based disparities in
representation appear to be unrelated to disparities in turnout and political knowledge and only
weakly related to disparities in the extent of constituents’ contact with senators and their staffs.
Economic Inequality and Political Representation 1
One of the most basic principles of democracy is the notion that every citizen’s preferences
should count equally in the realm of politics and government. As Robert Dahl (1971, 1) put it,
“a key characteristic of a democracy is the continued responsiveness of the government to the
preferences of its citizens, considered as political equals.” But there are a variety of good
reasons to believe that citizens are not considered as political equals by policy-makers in real
political systems. Wealthier and better-educated citizens are more likely than the poor and less-
educated to have well-formulated and well-informed preferences, significantly more likely to