Testing Models of Unequal Representation: Democratic Populists and Republican Oligarchs?

Abstract

Recent studies indicate that the wealthy receive more representation from their members of Congress, though this relationship may be more pronounced in Republican compared to Democratic districts. However, drawbacks in existing survey data hamper efforts to delineate the relationship between income and representation with precision, especially at the highest income levels. In this paper we use new data to explore the relationship between wealth, the party identity of elected officials, and representation in greater depth. We develop several alternative models of the relationship between income and representation, and compare them with models employed in previous empirical research. We test each of these models, using two different data sets containing large numbers of wealthy individuals and very granular measures of income. Our results suggest that individuals with Democratic congressional representatives experience a fundamentally different type of representation than do individuals with Republican representatives. Individuals with Democratic representatives encounter a mode of representation best described as ``populist,'' in which the relationship between income and representation is flat (if not negative). However, individuals with Republican representatives experience an ``oligarchic'' mode of representation, in which wealthy individuals receive much more representation than those lower on the economic ladder.