> Well, in the US, as possibly in other places, elections are usually won by the candidate who receives the most corporate support
Again, this is orthogonal to the point about inequality. Insofar as corporations or money are involved in politics in America, it's for campaigning — buying TV ads, flyers, etc. While it's true that this makes it easier for richer people to get their message out there, the fact of the matter is that the message still needs to resonate with a broad enough polity capturing working class, college educated, non-college educated, urban, rural voters etc (see: the Electoral College).
Just to give you some numbers, in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump $132M vs $92M.
In the ongoing Democratic Primary for the upcoming 2020 election, the TV ad spending through 12/3/2019 is as follows. The candidate's polling percentage at the same time is included in parenthesis.
Steyer: $63.4 million (1%)
Bloomberg: $37 million (<1%)
Sanders: $6.7 million (15%)
Buttigieg: $5.1 million (13%)
Yang: $2.9 million (4%)
Biden: $1.7 million (25%)
Klobuchar: $1.3 million (3%)
Bennet: $1 million (<1%)
Gabbard: $1 million (1%)
Warren: $926k (18%)
Delaney: $662k (<1%)
> On top of this, a bipartite political system can quite easily keep out candidates with views that are unpalatable to the rich and powerful (e.g. see how Bernie Sanders was treated by the Democratic establishment in 2016)
You're right about this, but the Democratic Primaries are not a good example of a democratic institution (ironically) — it's a private club and they can make their own rules, for better or for worse. During the general election, the opposite happened; the rich and powerful overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton, and yet she still lost.
> Individuals mostly rubber-stamp one of the two mainstream candidates.
This is true, but has nothing to do with economic inequality. The two-party system is an artifact of the first-past-the-post voting system. Since ~1860, there have only been two mainstream candidates, and inequality has varied wildly in that time period: i.e. no correlation.
In a society there are may levers (official or not, transparent or not) that the powerful can pull to get politics to lean their preferred way. This is true of all places and all times. The more power is concentrated, the easier it is for a very small group of individuals to have a very large impact on decision making.
All the billions poured in campaign funding, lobbying etc. do actually buy a lot of influence albeit not in a direct, transparent way.
The same billions can also sway public opinion through deliberate and persistent propaganda in support of certain view points and against others.
Nowadays (and probably throughout most of modern history) you have to be highly committed and quite fanatical if you want to develop well grounded opinions that are not very much affected by propaganda. Most people don't have the time and resources for this -> most people are easily swayed by corporate propaganda.
>The more power is concentrated, the easier it is for a very small group of individuals to have a very large impact on decision making.
So if we remove the federal government's broad involvement in all aspects of life, we can reduce the power of corporations by reducing their vehicle of control. I agree.
Unless you provide data or empirical evidence, it's just a vague intuition. There's more than enough evidence to the contrary (as I've provided).
At the end of the day, people act as individuals, and they have their beliefs and biases. For example, a small group of wealthy individuals can pour as much money as they want into pro-abortion propaganda, but it's unlikely that it will sway pro-lifers' opinions (especially evangelical Christians).
Money doesn't influence opinions directly, it just affords you a platform to try and change someone's mind. The only way to change one's mind is if the message is compelling, and because the US requires broad buy-in for any democratic action, the message needs to be compelling to a broad audience, not just a small group of wealthy people.
How do you explain presidential campaigns costing billions of dollars[0] in the first place? (And that's just one slice of the pie, when we take into account not only all the other election campaigns, but other sources of propaganda, lobbying, and so on.)
If that's what it costs to buy 'a platform to try and change someone's mind', then almost nobody can afford to to so without big money backing.
As for the donors' motivations, maybe you'll argue that they are merely supporting the candidates with favourable policies, rather than buying influence with them. But even if that were true, the donations would still be a means of converting $ into desired political outcomes.
I'm familiar with Ferguson's work. As with most economic work based on theoretical models, the empirical facts are more than enough to disprove them.
The famous IMF rebuttal of Piketty was an exercise in exactly the same. "rich in data, [but] the book provides no formal empirical testing for its theoretical causal chain". The same applies to the Investment Theory of Party Alignment. You can make an argument that poor people will follow rich people ideologically, but you can't 1) draw a causal line between the wealth and the influence, and 2) most importantly, you can't prove that poor people would ideologically follow rich people against their own self-assessed interests.
Again, this is orthogonal to the point about inequality. Insofar as corporations or money are involved in politics in America, it's for campaigning — buying TV ads, flyers, etc. While it's true that this makes it easier for richer people to get their message out there, the fact of the matter is that the message still needs to resonate with a broad enough polity capturing working class, college educated, non-college educated, urban, rural voters etc (see: the Electoral College).
Just to give you some numbers, in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump $132M vs $92M.
In the ongoing Democratic Primary for the upcoming 2020 election, the TV ad spending through 12/3/2019 is as follows. The candidate's polling percentage at the same time is included in parenthesis.
Steyer: $63.4 million (1%)
Bloomberg: $37 million (<1%)
Sanders: $6.7 million (15%)
Buttigieg: $5.1 million (13%)
Yang: $2.9 million (4%)
Biden: $1.7 million (25%)
Klobuchar: $1.3 million (3%)
Bennet: $1 million (<1%)
Gabbard: $1 million (1%)
Warren: $926k (18%)
Delaney: $662k (<1%)
> On top of this, a bipartite political system can quite easily keep out candidates with views that are unpalatable to the rich and powerful (e.g. see how Bernie Sanders was treated by the Democratic establishment in 2016)
You're right about this, but the Democratic Primaries are not a good example of a democratic institution (ironically) — it's a private club and they can make their own rules, for better or for worse. During the general election, the opposite happened; the rich and powerful overwhelmingly supported Hillary Clinton, and yet she still lost.
> Individuals mostly rubber-stamp one of the two mainstream candidates.
This is true, but has nothing to do with economic inequality. The two-party system is an artifact of the first-past-the-post voting system. Since ~1860, there have only been two mainstream candidates, and inequality has varied wildly in that time period: i.e. no correlation.