61. How Money Drives US Congressional Elections: More Evidence
- Author:
- Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgenson, and Jie Chen
- Publication Date:
- 04-2015
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET)
- Abstract:
- The protesters who swirled into parks, churches, and town squares around the world in the fall of 2011 to challenge the primacy of the “1%” hammered relentlessly on one theme above all others: that economic inequality has deep roots in the political system. Many social scientists and intellectuals who have picked up from where the Occupy movement left off share this conviction; they, too, have broken with the taboos that for so long segmented discussions of politics from economics. Piketty, in his monumental study, for example, avows that income distribution is a basically a question of “political economy” not pure economics. Stiglitz in The Price of Inequality is equally forthright – “increasingly, and especially in the United States, it seems that the political system is more akin to ‘one dollar one vote’ than to ‘one person one vote.’”
- Topic:
- Government, Politics, Science and Technology, History, Elections, Inequality, and Money
- Political Geography:
- North America and United States of America