In their analysis of survey responses regarding proposed federal policies, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page compare the policy preferences of “average citizens” versus “economic elites. They use the policy preferences of median-income survey respondents as a proxy for the preferences of the average citizen and the preferences of survey respondents in the top 10% income bracket as a proxy for the very wealthy. They found that if only elites favored a policy proposal, it was adopted by the US government a bit less than a third of the time. But if only average citizens favored a policy proposal, it was almost never adopted. Gilens and Page conclude that "[w]hen a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose" (576)  - a state of affairs under which"America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened." (577).

So, somehow, the average citizen has become a majority of citizens, which is odd since “average” doesn’t mean “most”. Gilens and Page also seem to assume that if politicians don’t adopt policies favored by most respondents in opinion surveys, they are not truly representing the majority of the electorate. But are survey responses a sufficient gauge of public support for government policy? Doesn’t the public’s behavior in the voting booth matter? After all, politicians need to secure a majority of votes to get elected. If the majority of voters don’t like the policies they get from the politicians they voted for, aren’t these politicians likely to lose their jobs?

Put simply, Gilens and Page are making confident claims about the implications of their research that go way beyond their findings. In doing do, they are violating several basic principles of good research:

“Good research is cautious about drawing conclusions, careful to identify uncertainties and avoids exaggerated claims. It demands multiple types of evidence to reach a conclusion. It does not assume that association (things occur together) proves causation (one thing causes another). Bad research often contains jumps in logic, spurious arguments, and non-sequiturs (‘it does not follow’).” Todd Litman

References:

Gilens, M. and Page, B.I. “Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens” Perspectives on Politics September 2014 | Vol. 12/No. 3, 564-58.

Litman, Todd “Evaluating Research Quality:  Guidelines for Scholarship” 22 February 2012; Victoria Transport Policy Institute.