In response to my post on the Voting Rights Act one of my boys asked me (rhetorically) why black people don’t vote…or at the very least why we have to have voting drives to get people to even think about voting.

The following abstract might help. I had a post relating to it in the last iteration of the blog but I didn’t port it over. Martin Gilens is not only one of the best political scientists in the business, but he also has the right politics. He published a piece entitled Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness in a 2005 edition of Public Opinion Quarterly. The abstract:

By allowing voters to choose among candidates with competing policy orientations and by providing incentives for incumbents to shape policy in the direction the public desires, elections are thought to provide the foundation that links government policy to the preferences of the governed. In this article I examine the extent to which the preference/policy link is biased toward the preferences of high-income Americans. Using an original data set of almost two thousand survey questions on proposed policy changes between 1981 and 2002, I find a moderately strong relationship between what the public wants and what the government does, albeit with a strong bias toward the status quo. But I also find that when Americans with different income levels differ in their policy preferences, actual policy outcomes strongly reflect the preferences of the most affluent but bear virtually no relationship to the preferences of poor or middle-income Americans. The vast discrepancy I find in government responsiveness to citizens with different incomes stands in stark contrast to the ideal of political equality that Americans hold dear. Although perfect political equality is an unrealistic goal, representational biases of this magnitude call into question the very democratic character of our society.

A majority of people (black, white, latino, asian, native american, etc.) don’t vote because they understand this and do not believe that voting will help solve this problem. I think they’re wrong…but not all that far off.