Social Democratic America (26 page)

A variant of this second hypothesis says that the flood of private money won't kill Democrats' electoral fortunes, but it will push them to the right, reducing their support for social policy advance.
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This is possible. However, we've already experienced a flood of private money into politics over the past three decades. According to the standard measure of policy makers' voting, it hasn't produced a shift to the center among Democratic legislators.
Figure 5.4
shows voting trends on economic issues by House and Senate Democrats. Democrats did not move toward the center during this period. This is partly because the number of Democratic senators and representatives from the conservative South has been declining. But even among nonsouthern Democratic lawmakers, there is no sign of a move to the center.
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Focusing on voting might be misleading. After all, much of the important decision making by policy makers occurs before proposals come to a final vote. If we could measure this, we might find there has in fact been a move toward the center by Democrats in response to the growing influence of campaign contributors. But if that shift has happened, it has yet to be documented.

FIGURE
5.4 Voting by Democrats in the House and Senate

Average “dimension 1 DW-nominate” scores for Democratic legislators. The range shown here is –1 to +1 (left to right).
Data source
: Keith Poole and Christopher Hare, “An Update on Political Polarization through the 112th Congress,”
Voteview
, January 16, 2013.

Since Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, a significant portion of the American left has been in a near-constant state of despair about the electoral future of the Democratic Party. The party had drifted too far to the left, according to some. It had moved too far to the right, said others. It was incapable of nominating effective candidates. It couldn't keep up with the Republicans' fundraising. It lost touch with ordinary Americans. It was disorganized. It was too liberal on social issues. It was too dependent on big finance for campaign funding.

Each of these concerns is understandable. But the Democratic Party and its major candidates have, at least to this point, proven more resilient than pessimists expected. The Democrats have won four of the last six presidential elections, and in the past six congresses they've held a majority in the House twice and in the Senate four times. The recent past isn't necessarily a useful guide to the future. It's possible that American politics is on the verge of a sea change, with the Democrats' electoral fortunes dwindling. But that does not seem especially likely.

According to a distinguished line of political analysis, from E. E. Schattschneider to William Domhoff to Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers to Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, the scope and generosity of government social policy in the United States is determined less by election outcomes than by the relative strength of organized interest groups.
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Since the mid-1970s, American businesses and America's rich have mobilized, while the left has fragmented and weakened.
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Will this altered balance of power inhibit further progress in social policy?

FIGURE
5.5 “One-off shift” and “continuing trend” hypotheses about the relative strength of organized interest groups

The vertical scale indicates the relative strength of organized interest groups. Higher on the axis indicates the right is stronger; lower indicates the left is stronger.

There are two versions of this line of thinking.
Figure 5.5
displays a stylized depiction of each. According to the first, the change was a one-off shift in the level of organizational strength. It happened in the late 1970s and/or the early 1980s, and there has been no change since. According to the second, the shift is a trend. It began in the late 1970s, has been ongoing since then, and will continue into the future.

If the change in the balance of interest group organization was a one-off shift, its impact on social policy advance should already be apparent, given that the shift occurred quite a while ago. Has progress in social policy stopped?

No. It has slowed, but it hasn't ceased.
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There have been quite a few advances since the 1970s, including:

• Increases in the EITC and expansion of access (in 1986, 1990, 1993, 2009)

• Expansion of unemployment insurance (2009)

• Increases in Medicaid benefits and expansion of access (1984–88, 1998, 2010)

• Free immunization for kids in low-income families (Vaccines for Children, 1993)

• Expansion of Medicare to include prescription drugs (2004)

• Subsidy to low-income families' for childcare expenses (Child Care and Development Fund, 1990, 2009)

• Expansions of Head Start (1984, 1990, 1995, 2009)

• Expansion of public kindergarten to full days in most states and establishment of age-three and age-four prekindergarten programs in some states

• Reduction of funding inequality across elementary and secondary schools in most states

• Public funding of after-school activities in schools in low-income communities (21st Century Community Learning Centers program, 1998)

• Increases in college student loan funding (Pell Grant, Lifetime Learning Credit, Hope Credit)

• Expansions of retraining, job placement assistance, access to healthcare, and income support for people who lose a job due to international trade (1997, 2002, 2009)

• Antidiscrimination protection for people with disabilities (1990)

• Increase in disability benefits and expansion of access

• Creation and expansion of the Child Tax Credit (1997, 2003)

• Guaranteed right to unpaid family leave (1993) and introduction of paid leave in a few states (since 2004)

• Increase in housing assistance (1987)

• Establishment of and increases in energy assistance (Low-Income Energy Assistance, 1981, 2009)

The one notable move in the opposite direction took place with AFDC. From the 1970s on, benefit levels have decreased in inflation-adjusted terms, and the 1996 welfare reform put time limits on benefit receipt. But AFDC was a uniquely unpopular social program. In fact, welfare is the lone public social program consistently disliked by a majority of Americans.
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In any event, its weakening is the exception, not the rule.

Some consider the 1983 Social Security amendments another exception. To shore up the program's funding, these reforms raised the retirement age, increased the payroll tax, and increased the taxation of Social Security benefits. The increase in the retirement age was a benefit cut, but it was merited, arguably, by rising life expectancy.

Additional evidence that social policy became more generous is found in CBO data.
Figure 5.6
shows the CBO's estimates of the amount by which transfers and taxes boosted household incomes at the twentieth percentile of income from 1979 to 2007. The amount increased steadily. A good bit of this owed to increases in the value of Medicare and Medicaid benefits, but even so, these data suggest overall improvement in the size and scope of American social policy.
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FIGURE
5.6 Difference between household market income and posttransferposttax income at the twentieth percentile of the income ladder

Incomes are adjusted for household size. The market income measure includes earnings, employer-paid health insurance premiums, the employer share of payroll taxes, business income, capital income, and capital gains. The posttransfer-posttax income measure subtracts federal tax payments and adds cash and in-kind government transfers, including Social Security, unemployment insurance, SSI, AFDC-TANF, veterans' benefits, workers' compensation, state and local cash assistance programs, food stamps, school lunches and breakfasts, housing assistance, energy assistance, Medicare, Medicaid, and S-CHIP. The health benefits are measured as the fungible value to the recipient. The incomes are in 2007 dollars; inflation adjustment is via the CPI-U-RS. The line is a loess curve.
Data source
: Congressional Budget Office, “Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007,” 2011, appendix tables A-1 and A-3.

If the shift in organized power was a one-off, the fact that public social policy has continued to advance despite the shift implies that we are likely to see further advance in the future.

The second version of the shift-in-the-balance-of-organized-power hypothesis, depicted in the second chart in
figure 5.5
, posits that the shift is a trend. It began in the late 1970s and has been ongoing since then, with the strength of the right relative to the left steadily increasing. This paints a worrisome picture, suggesting we have not yet reached the point of maximum strength in the organized power of the right.

If this hypothesis is correct, what might the impact on advances in social policy be? We can glean some information by comparing policy change in the 1980s and the 2000s. If the continuing-trend hypothesis is correct, there should have been less social policy advance in the 2000s than in the 1980s. That isn't the case, according to the list of increases in the size and scope of social programs shown earlier and the information in
figure 5.6
. If we don't include the changes in the 2009 economic stimulus or the 2010 healthcare reform, the rate of advance in the two decades is similar. If we include those 2009–10 policy advances, the 2000s come out ahead by a good bit.

Here, too, the most reasonable conclusion is that the pattern of progress in social policy over the past century will continue.

Even if the obstacles I've considered so far can be overcome, progress toward more expansive and generous social policy might be impeded by our political system's abundance of “veto points”—a legislature and executive each elected directly by the people, two coequal legislative bodies, and the filibuster in the Senate.
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These offer a determined minority multiple ways to block proposed policy changes.

On the one hand, these features of America's political system have been in place for some time, and while they surely have slowed the pace of social policy advance in the United States, they haven't prevented it. On the other hand, recent years have seen an increase in the cohesiveness, discipline, and confrontational posture of Republicans in Congress, making it very difficult for Democrats to get legislation passed unless they hold the presidency, a majority in the House, and sixty seats in the Senate. Does this spell the end of social policy advance?

The extensiveness of veto points has taken on new importance in American politics because the Democratic and Republican parties have become much more cohesive. Until recently, both were loose collections of individuals with varying orientations and policy preferences. This was largely a legacy of the Civil War and the New Deal. In the South, many viewed the Civil War as a military invasion engineered by the Republican Party. For the better part of the following century, political competition in the South occurred entirely within the Democratic Party rather than between Democrats and Republicans. With the New Deal legislation in the 1930s, the Democrats became the party in favor of government intervention to enhance security and opportunity. Although this conflicted with the conservative orientation of many southern Democrats, they remained in the party until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 aligned the national Democratic Party with equal rights for African Americans.