Affluence and Policy Influence in Advanced Democracies
Recent scholarship argues that affluence begets policy influence, thereby questioning whether contemporary democracy lives up to its key promise of formal political equality. A strong empirical emphasis of this scholarship, however, has left fundamental analytical issues unresolved with implications for the conclusions. In this article, I develop an analytical framework in order to solve two central, unresolved issues: (1) the representational implications of formal political equality, and (2) the necessary conditions for policy influence.