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White‐Collar Government in the United States
Author(s) -
Carnes Nicholas
Publication year - 2015
Publication title -
swiss political science review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.632
H-Index - 30
eISSN - 1662-6370
pISSN - 1424-7755
DOI - 10.1111/spsr.12165
Subject(s) - politics , white (mutation) , government (linguistics) , political science , supreme court , house of representatives , working class , public administration , law , political economy , sociology , biochemistry , linguistics , philosophy , gene , chemistry
If millionaires in the United States formed their own political party, that party would make up just three percent of the country, but it would have a majority in the House of Representatives, a filibuster-proof super-majority in the Senate, a 5:4 majority on the Supreme Court, and a man in the White House. If working-class Americans—people employed in manual-labor and service-industry jobs—were a political party, that party would have made up more than half of the country since the start of the twentieth century. But legislators from that party (those who last worked in blue-collar jobs before getting into politics) would never have held more than two percent of the seats in Congress. In the last few years, scholars of US politics have started taking a renewed interest in what I call white-collar government, the disproportionate numerical representation of wealthy people and white-collar professionals in our political institutions. Political scientists are once again asking how government by the upper class affects public policy in the United States. And they’re starting to ask why our representative process consistently gives us such economically unrepresentative slates of politicians.