Exhibit 695

Reconsidering the Middle: A Reply to Martin Gilens

Exhibit 695 · Peer-reviewed reply

Reconsidering the Middle: A Reply to Martin Gilens

Scholars cannot treat preference gaps as synonymous with unequal representation.

Enns agrees with Gilens that median-income and affluent respondents 'fairly often get the policies they favor' and that 'democracy by coincidence' holds normatively; they disagree on the extent and implications. Enns cites Bashir's finding that when majorities disagree the median sees its desired outcome 47 percent of the time against 53 percent for the affluent. He notes that Gilens's 'twice as likely' figure rests on a 5.1 percent subset of the data. He concedes (note 5) that Gilens could be right if policies the middle prefers and the affluent oppose are kept off the agenda and never polled, which the data cannot test, and that the truly rich may influence policy at the expense of both groups.

Source: Peter K. Enns, Perspectives on Politics 13(4), pp. 1072-1074
Date: December 2015
Quoted from: p. 1073
Grade: Peer-reviewed
Document: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1537592715002339
Accessed: 2026-11-09
Cited by: Findings citing this exhibit

Cited by

Finding POL-2.5: Reported Gilens and Page report that when only the affluent strongly supported a change, at 75 percent support or 25 percent opposition, it was adopted 46 percent of the time, and when only the middle class strongly supported it, 24 percent of the time. When the affluent strongly opposed a change the middle class did not, adoption was 4 percent, and in the reverse case 40 percent.
Finding POL-2.6: Peer-reviewed Enns found that support for proposed policies among the 50th and 90th income percentiles correlates at r=.94, and at r=.68 among the 18 percent of policies where the two groups differ by more than 10 points. About 66 percent of adoption values predicted from middle-income preferences fall inside the 95 percent intervals of the values predicted from affluent preferences.
Finding POL-2.15: Open question The Gilens-Page elite coefficient attaches to the 90th income percentile, about $146,000 in household income. No cited source measures the policy preferences of the top 1 percent across issues and years, so the effect cannot be assigned to the very rich.
Finding POL-2.16: Open question The Gilens-Page data cannot show whether proposals the middle class favors and the affluent oppose fail by being kept off the agenda or by being voted down.