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Articles
Oligarchy in the United States?
Jeffrey A. Winters and Benjamin I. Page
We explore the possibility that the US political system can usefully be characterized as oligarchic. Using a material-based definition
drawn from Aristotle, we argue that oligarchy is not inconsistent with democracy; that oligarchs need not occupy formal office or
conspire together or even engage extensively in politics in order to prevail; that great wealth can provide both the resources and the
motivation to exert potent political influence. Data on the US distributions of income and wealth are used to construct several
Material Power Indices, which suggest that the wealthiest Americans may exert vastly greater political influence than average citizens
and that a very small group of the wealthiest (perhaps the top tenth of 1 percent) may have sufficient power to dominate policy in
certain key areas. A brief review of the literature suggests possible mechanisms by which such influence could occur, through lobbying, the electoral process, opinion shaping, and the US Constitution itself.
here is widespread agreement that the United States
is a democracy. But is it possible that the US political system is also oligarchic? We believe that the
concept of oligarchy can be fruitfully applied not only to
places like Singapore, Colombia, Russia, and Indonesia,
but also to the contemporary United States.
Key to this belief is the fact that oligarchy and democracy are not mutually exclusive but rather can coexist
comfortably—indeed, can be fused integrally—into governments that Aristotle conceived to be an “admixture of
the two elements.” 1 Moreover, the existence of oligarchy
need not depend upon oligarchs’ holding formal government positions (indirect influence is sufficient) or upon
explicit coordination or cohesion among oligarchs. It need
not be affected by the circulation of elites. It does not
require extensive political engagement by oligarchs themselves. It is not subject to “canceling” effects from pluralistic struggles in which oligarchs compete with each other
or with other major political forces. Oligarchy can exist
with respect to certain limited but crucial policy issues at
the same time that many other important issues are governed through pluralistic competition or even populistic
democracy.
One of the present authors, Winters, is completing an
extensive study of oligarchy in various countries. Our
purpose here is not to give a full theoretical or empirical
account of the nature and workings of oligarchy, but
merely to suggest that the concept helps illuminate important aspects of the contemporary US case. We believe
that minority power is a fact of life in any complex society, with representative government changing the character and extent, but not the fact, of majority exclusion.
On this point Robert Michels was right, even if his famous
“iron law” muddles the most important aspects of oligarchy by focusing on organizational complexity rather than
power.2 Contrary to elite theory (and to a range of writings on oligarchy that are confused versions of elite theory),
we argue that the concept of oligarchy properly refers to
a specific kind of minority power that is fundamentally
material in character. In the US context, as elsewhere,
the central question is whether and how the wealthiest
citizens deploy unique and concentrated power resources
to defend their unique minority interests. In the United
States (as elsewhere), to the extent that such minority
power is exercised, the political system can be considered
an oligarchy.
T
Jeffrey A. Winters is associate professor of Political Science,
Northwestern University ([email protected]).
Benjamin I. Page is Fulcher professor of Political Science
([email protected]). For comments and suggestions
we are grateful to Edward Greenberg, Benjamin R. Page,
Bonnie Honig, Kay Lehman Schlozman, Edward Wolff, Tom
Ferguson, Chris Howell, Lawrence Jacobs, Christopher
Jencks, Meredith Jung-en Woo, William Domhoff, Mary
Dietz, Joseph Peschek, James Farr, Eric Rasmusen, Nathan Dapeer, Jonathan Pincus, Rizal Ramli, Marc Blecher, Richard
P. Young, and Edward Gibson. Jeffrey Winters would also like
to thank the participants at his talk on “Oligarchy and the
American Case” at Oberlin College in October 2006; at his
November 2007 talk on “Oligarchy and Elite Rule” at Northwestern University’s Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies; and the probing discussions in 2008 at
Northwestern with the members of Timothy Earle’s “Chieftancy Working Group.”
December 2009 | Vol. 7/No. 4 731
doi:10.1017/S1537592709991770
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Articles | Oligarchy in the United States?
In presenting these ideas, we seek to advance the
research agenda heralded by the American Political Science Association’s 2004 Task Force on Inequality and
American Democracy, and recently advanced by Bartels
and Page and Jacobs.3 Indeed, although the theme of the
2006 American Political Science Association Conference
was “Power Reconsidered,” our basic point is that political science as a whole and the American politics subfield
in particular needs to treat power, especially in its material form, much more seriously than it recently has done.
The Theory of Oligarchy
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We adopt a definition derived from Aristotle: oligarchy
involves the exercise of power by the richest citizens—who
happen always to be “the few.” 4 Oligarchy refers broadly
to extreme political inequalities that necessarily accompany extreme material inequalities. Oligarchs are actors
who personally command or control massive concentrations of wealth—a material form of power that is distinct
from all other power resources, and which can be readily
deployed for political purposes. This materialist interpretation of oligarchy was dominant from Antiquity until the
emergence of elite theory at the end of the nineteenth
century, when scholars such as Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo
Pareto, and Robert Michels stretched the analysis of oligarchy to include power resources other than wealth. The
concept of oligarchy then lost clarity and explanatory value
by being blended with notions of elite power. Pareto, for
instance, saw liberal democracies as sham “demogagic
plutocracies,” in which politicians, party bosses, union
leaders, capitalists, and other elites engage in patron-client
relations fed by money flows.5 More recent attempts to
define oligarchs and oligarchy, particularly in the US context, have foundered for a variety of reasons—the most
important being that oligarchy has mistakenly been construed as incompatible, both conceptually and functionally, with democracy. We argue that oligarchy limits
democracy but does not render it a sham.
In our view, oligarchs and oligarchy can best be defined
and understood by focusing at the individual level on
power resources, particularly material power resources as
manifested in wealth.6 There are three aspects of material
wealth that have led it to serve as a unique and persistent
source of political power throughout much of human civilization. First, wealth has generally been highly concentrated among a very few citizens. Second, material wealth
of whatever sort (money in the bank, equity ownership of
corporations, ownership of landed estates) has—in virtually all times and places—been easily translatable into substantial political influence. Third, the ownership of material
wealth carries with it a set of political interests: interests in
preserving and protecting that wealth, interests in ensuring its free use for many purposes, and interests in acquiring more wealth. That is, highly concentrated material
wealth generally brings with it both enormous political
power and the motivation to use that power in order to
win certain kinds of political-economic outcomes. Possession of great wealth defines membership in an oligarchy,
provides the means to exert oligarchic power, and provides the incentives to use that power for the core political
objective of wealth defense (which, depending on the
national and historical context, means property defense,
income defense, or both).
The power resources approach to oligarchs and oligarchy underscores the importance of power capacities, or, as
Isaac framed it in his critique of the faces-of-power debate,
“power to” rather than “power over.” 7
Clearly wealth is not the only source of political power.
Power can also proceed from holding formal political office,
from enjoying political rights (such as “one person, one
vote” under a democratic electoral system), from personal
or organizational capacity to mobilize others, and from
coercive capacity or armed force. (In most modern polities, however, the coercive function is largely monopolized by the state.) Our argument is only that wealth is
consistently a major source of political power and that it is
often the most important source with respect to certain
policies. In many or most political systems, concentrated
wealth in the hands of a small fraction of a community’s
members is a particularly versatile and potent source of
political power. During the politics of the ordinary, wealth
can hire or persuade the wielders of other political resources.
In extraordinary times, severe threats to property and wealth
can provoke the richest citizens to engage in destabilizing
and sometimes violent political and economic reactions.
A distinctive quality of political power based on wealth
is that it does not depend upon extensive investments of
time or action by wealthy individuals themselves, nor does
it rely for its potency on mobilization and coordination
among oligarchs. The wealthy often control large organizations, such as business corporations, that can act for
them. They can hire armies of professional, skilled actors
from the middle and upper-middle classes who labor as
salaried advocates and defenders of core oligarchic interests. In modern societies these actors are often denizens of
foundations, think tanks, politically connected law firms,
consultancies, and lobbying organizations. Sometimes they
are politicians or officials recruited and funded by the
wealthy. They blend smoothly into the complex give and
take of pluralist politics, but their character, focus, and
effect is different: it is to advance the basic material interests of the wealthy.
The literatures on oligarchy and democracy usually view
the two political arrangements as mutually exclusive. We
view them as compatible and often fused. Thus it does not
follow from our argument that the wealthy dominate all
facets of politics. In a formally democratic political system,
Dahlian pluralistic struggles—and even segmented (not general or revolutionary) mass mobilizations—may carry the
732 Perspectives on Politics
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sphere in which voice, organization, and voting matter.
An oligarchic-mass settlement, in which masses of ordinary citizens are persuaded to accept the key requirements
of oligarchs, permits a classic Aristotelian fusion in which
oligarchy respects and allows democracy and liberal freedoms, so long as democracy respects and allows oligarchy.
A thriving oligarchy in the richest and most politically
developed nations implies a limited, rather than a sham,
democracy.
It is important to recognize that oligarchy can operate
without explicit coordination or cohesion among oligarchs. School ties, clubs, social networks, interlocking
directorates and the like among the wealthy can be interesting and important, but they are not necessary to enable
oligarchs to act in unison. The common material interests
of the wealthy can be sufficient for that. In key realms,
common interests lead nearly all wealthy individuals to
seek the same sorts of policies. Moreover, the wealthy often
constitute a “privileged group” in Mancur Olson’s sense:
one or more individuals with extreme wealth can gain so
much from, say, a free trade agreement or a regressive tax
cut that they have incentives to act on their own.13 There
is no need to cooperate or coordinate with other wealthy
individuals. Ordinary citizens, by contrast, though very
much affected in the aggregate, usually have far less at
stake as individuals and are more divided than the superrich. For non-oligarchs, any effort to mobilize faces formidable collective action problems.
The common material interests of the wealthy help overcome any threat to oligarchy that might result from the
circulation of elites and the replacement of individual oligarchs by newcomers. Individuals who start from modest
beginnings and acquire great wealth usually learn rather
quickly that they have new material interests. The occasional renegade is no match for the monolithic power and
shared interests of the oligarchy as a whole.14 Indeed, Mosca
and Pareto pointed out long ago that elite circulation brings
new vigor to an oligarchy and strengthens its legitimacy.
day on many issues involving such matters as race, women,
gays, ethnicity, religion, morality, guns, or the environment.8 These are issues of great importance to many ordinary citizens, but of only limited and cross-cutting concern
to the wealthy. We are arguing here that the earlier critics of
“the biases of pluralism” were onto something, that the
skewed distribution of wealth in the United States is a source
of oligarchy, and that US political scientists, and especially
scholars of American politics, ought to pay much more attention to these issues than they do.9 To the extent that they
have failed to do this, the field, in spite of its increasing technical sophistication, has made less progress than many like
to believe.10
The extent and character of oligarchic power varies
according to place and historical period, from wild and
unconstrained to tamed and restricted. In some countries,
oligarchs still have layered upon them power linked to
race or ethnicity, noble birth, or religion. But oligarchic
power always covers issues that affect the core material
interests of the wealthy in safeguarding claims to what
they have and permitting the acquisition of more. Distinctly oligarchic interests are focused on wealth defense,
which has two components: property defense (avoiding
confiscation by force) and income defense (avoiding legal
redistribution of otherwise secure private property). From
the time of the first civilizations until the rise of the modern state, oligarchs devoted most of their attention to property defense and were compelled to make major investments
in capacities for violence and coercion.The advent of secure
and institutionalized arrangements for property defense has
allowed oligarchs to focus far more on defending income.
In the US case this means deflecting redistributive taxation
and shifting the burdens of social welfare downward to the
less affluent. In modern societies it has also meant the legal
creation and protection of limited liability corporations and
the facilitation of their global reach through open markets,
free trade, and investment of capital abroad.
It would be too risky to leave potentially divisive, extreme
asymmetries of wealth to the mercies of pure democracy.11 The rise of representative democracy involved a
difficult and delicately executed trade-off of property security for the richest and historically most powerful actors in
exchange for universal suffrage for the unpropertied masses.
Whenever this bargain has broken down (and since World
War II it has done so only in poorer states where institutions are weak), democracy has broken down with it. This
same arrangement that guarantees the property of the
wealthiest against serious threats forms the basis of the
fusion between oligarchy and democracy.
Once a stable oligarchic-mass settlement is in place—
often accompanied by an “elite settlement”—so that serious threats to oligarchy disappear, a democratic “politics
of the ordinary” can proceed to govern many issues of
little interest to oligarchs as a group.12 Dahlian polyarchy
can blossom within a broad—though not unlimited—
The US Case
Does an identifiable oligarchy exist in the United States?
If so, how do oligarchs overcome the democratic features
of the political system and circumvent majority rule on
certain issues? Over what policy domains, if any, do they
exert decisive influence?
A useful starting point is to consider the extent of economic inequality in the United States. Economic inequality may be taken as an indicator of highly concentrated
material resources for influencing politics (the primary
condition for the existence of oligarchy) and perhaps also
as evidence of non-majoritarian public policies—of the
failure of a democratic political system to redress marketbased inequalities that disadvantage large majorities of the
population.
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The story is a familiar one: since about 1973 the real
wages and family incomes of average Americans have lagged
behind productivity gains and have mostly stagnated, while
those at the very top of the income distribution have prospered spectacularly. The result has been very high—and
sharply increased—inequality.15 For the year 2005, for
example, Piketty and Saez—using IRS income tax data,
which probably understate top incomes—found that the
top 1 percent of Americans (more precisely, the top 1
percent of “tax units”) 16 received the largest share of
national income they had enjoyed since 1928: more than
one fifth of it. The top 300,000 Americans collectively
received almost as much income as the bottom 150 million. Per taxpayer, the top group received 440 times as
much as the average in the bottom half, nearly doubling
the gap from 1980.17
The sharp increase in economic inequality can be illustrated by the greatly increased gap between the earnings of
average factory or service workers and the earnings of the
chief executive officers of the firms they work for. In 1973
the average CEO in major companies earned approximately 27 times as much as the average worker, a substantial premium. But in 2005, when the average worker earned
$41,861, the average CEO was paid $10,980,000: 262
times as much.18
Even more dramatic is what has happened to incomes at
the very top. In 2006, three managers of hedge funds each
took home more than one billion dollars ($1,000,000,000,
one thousand million dollars) in income, putting to shame
the mere $10 million received by the average CEO. Their
combined income was $4.4 billion, with the top earner,
James Simons, making $1.7 billion, followed by Kenneth
Griffin and Edward Lampert earning $1.4 and $1.3 billion, respectively. The top 25 hedge fund managers got a
total of $14 billion in 2006, more than the gross domestic
product of Jordan or Uruguay—that is, enough to double
the income of every person in one of those countries.19
Incredibly, hedge fund managers did even better in 2007:
the total take of the top twenty-five jumped from $14 billion to $22 billion. The top five each took home more than
$1 billion. John Paulson earned about $3.7 billion; George
Soros made $2.9 billion; and James Simons got $2.8 billion, now ranking only third despite making $1.1 billion
more in 2007 than 2006.20
Of course many top income earners have faced steep
drops in income with the 2008–2009 economic crash;
figures for 2009, when available, will certainly be lower.
But it is far from clear that the extent of inequality in
incomes has been affected. Those on the bottom—suffering
pay and benefit cuts and sometimes losing jobs altogether—
have taken very sharp percentage hits as well, which may
have left the shape of income distribution much the same.
Consider that every citizen has an individual power
profile based on the power resources he or she can deploy.
One person’s power profile might be very low because
although he has a right to vote (part of the power profile
of all registered adult citizens), he is unmobilized and has
almost no spare material resources. Another person’s power
profile might be very high by virtue of holding an office
like senator or being a Supreme Court justice. Yet another
person’s individual power profile might be high because
she is capable of mobilizing tens of thousands of other
citizens to act in concert. And finally, there is the person
whose power profile is dominated more than anything
else by ownership of massive material resources in the
form of income or wealth.
Suppose, for the sake of argument, that money income
can be translated easily and directly into political power
and—as a first cut into the problem—that it translates on
a one-to-one basis: twice the income produces twice the
political power, and so forth.21 A search for oligarchy in
the United States, then, could begin by calculating exactly
how much income the richest Americans get as a multiple
of the income earned by most other Americans. This ratio
could be used as a first, rough estimate of the political
power of potential oligarchs.22 An effort to calculate such
an income-based Material Power Index for individuals (or,
more precisely, tax units) is presented in the third column
of table 1.
In table 1 the bottom 90 percent of Americans—the
vast majority of the US population, including most of the
middle and upper middle classes—are taken as the baseline. The average income of tax units in the bottom 90
percent ($29,143 in 2005) is arbitrarily assigned a power
index score of 1.0. That is, the average member of the
bottom 90 percent is treated as having exactly 1 unit of
political power. (Note that this treatment ignores very substantial inequalities within the 90 percent, which have
been the subject of many survey-based studies of unequal
political voice. We are concerned here chiefly with the
very top of the income distribution, which is too small to
show up in most survey samples representative of the whole
population.)
Reading upwards from the bottom of the third column
of table 1, the average incomes of increasingly small but
increasingly affluent groups of Americans are expressed as
multiples of the average income of the bottom 90 percent,
producing figures for the Individual Material Power Index
that rise markedly as one moves toward the top of the
table. By this income-based measure of material political
resources, each member of the top 10 percent of income
earners averaged 8.5 times as much political power as the
average member of the bottom 90 percent. Each member
of the top 1 percent averaged 38.1 times as much; each of
the top tenth of 1 percent, 190.7 times as much; and each
member of the top hundredth of 1 percent of income
earners averaged a remarkable 882.8 times as much incomebased political power as the average member of the bottom 90 percent of income earners. These discrepancies are
vastly greater than the SES- or income-related biases and
734 Perspectives on Politics
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Table 1
Income-based material power indices
Fraction of taxpayers
Top 1/100 of 1%
Top 1/10 of 1%
Top 1%
Top 10%
Bottom 90%
Average income
Individual Power Index
Total Group Power Index
$25,726,965
$5,556,963
$1,111,560
$246,853
$29,143
882.8
190.7
38.1
8.5
1.0
5.1%
10.9%
21.8%
48.5%
51.5%
Source: http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/TabFig2005prel.xlx, Tables A0, A3, A6, revised 3/12/07, updating Piketty and Saez (2003);
computations by the present authors. Based on IRS tabulations of individual income tax returns for 2005, CPS-estimated number
of potential tax units, and National Income Accounts total income figures. Income and rankings include realized capital gains.
The Individual Power Index for each income fractile is a ratio, calculated as the average income for that fractile divided by the
average income of the bottom 90%. The Total Group Power Index for a fractile is the percentage of total national income received
by that group. Except for the bottom 90%, each group is inclusive of the smaller groups above it.
rather than income. Most of the resources of the working
and middle classes are not available for political action.
Their income has to go for day-to-day necessities. Great
wealth, on the other hand, can command political influence even when the wealth-owner’s annual income is low
or negative. Many of the wealthiest individuals maintain
large savings that can be readily tapped. And illiquid wealth
can serve as collateral for loans that can be spent on politics. Furthermore, without anyone spending a dime, wealth
can pose a threat to—can hover as a dark cloud of potential retaliation above—any politician who might threaten
the interests of wealth holders. Thus wealth is more relevant to political power than income. And it is more highly
concentrated in fewer hands. A focus on wealth provides
stronger evidence for the existence of oligarchy.
We now know a fair amount about the distribution of
wealth in the United States. One good source of data is
the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) by the Federal
Reserve Board, which regularly (every three years since
1983) has gathered information on the elusive upper ranges
of the wealth distribution by over-sampling the very rich
and by imputing information on items for which survey
responses are unreliable. Using SCF data and a definition
of wealth based on “marketable” net worth (excluding consumer durables and pension rights beyond currently realizable value, but including owner-occupied homes as well
as other real estate, cash, savings deposits, bonds, cash
surrender value of life insurance, stock, equity in unincorporated businesses, and trust funds, minus all debt), Edward
Wolff has calculated that in 2004 the top 1 percent of US
wealth-holding households had fully 34.3 percent of all
the wealth in the country, while the bottom 40 percent of
wealth holders had just 0.2 percent of the total. The top 1
percent held, on average, $14,786,000 in net worth (up
78 percent in real terms since 1983), whereas the bottom
40 percent averaged only a meager $2,200 in net worth—
down 59 percent since 1983.25
political inequalities that show up in standard, surveybased studies of mass political participation.23
Would this degree of concentrated power be sufficient to
establish the existence of oligarchy in the United States? Striking as these figures are, they still leave room for doubt. The
groups that include the highest-income, most powerful individuals are quite small, so that the total power wielded by
those groups may not be overwhelming. We have tried to
take this into account with a “Total Group” Material Power
Index—shown in the fourth column of the table—which
calculates the income-based resources of each income group
(that is, the total income received by the group) as a percentage of all income received in the country. By this measure the power of the highest income earners looks less
imposing. The tiny group consisting of the top hundredth
of 1 percent of income earners, for example, together has
“only” about 5 percent of all the income-based power in the
country.The top tenth of 1 percent together have only about
11 percent of it. And the top 1 percent have “only” about
22 percent of the total income-based power.
On the other hand, one may consider it to be rather
sobering that by this measure the top 10 percent of the
population has about as much material-based political
power as the entire bottom 90 percent. This may or may
not be a definitive sign of oligarchy, but it certainly does
not look like pure, one-person one-vote democracy. Furthermore, higher-income people are probably able to deploy
more of their incomes for politics, more effectively, than
are those on the bottom. The bottom 90 percent face
formidable collective action and communications problems, and they must spend a much higher proportion of
their incomes on necessities. For similar reasons fiscal sociologists have argued that just a 4 percent ownership share
in a large organization (such as a business corporation) is
often sufficient to control the organization.24
In any case, the picture changes when we recall the
Aristotelian definition of oligarchy, which focuses on wealth
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Articles | Oligarchy in the United States?
Table 2
Wealth-based material power indices
Fraction of Adult Population
Average Wealth
Individual Power Index
Forbes 400 list of richest Americans (2000: Kopczuk & Saez)
Top 5/100,000 of 1% (n = 101) $8,191,000,000
59,619 a
Top 2/10,000 of 1% (n = 404)
$3,000,000,000
21,836 a
Estate tax method (2000: Kopczuk & Saez)
Top 1/100 of 1%
$63,564,000
462.7 a
Top 1/10 of 1%
$14,786,000
107.6 a
Top 1%
$3,392,000
24.7 a
Survey of Consumer Finances (2004: Wolff)
Top 1% of households
$14,786,000
107.6
($13,485,000 non-home)
(199.4 based on
non-home wealth)
Top 10%
$3,068,000
22.3
Bottom 90%
$137,389
1.0
($67,611 non-home)
Total Group Power Index
2.5%
3.7%
3.9%
9.1%
20.8%
34.3%
(42.2% based on
non-home wealth)
71.2%
28.7%
(19.1 non-home)
Sources: Kopczuk and Saez (2004a, tables 1,2,3,6; 2004b, table B2); Wolff 2007, tables 2,4); computations by the present authors.
Based on net worth including home equity except where noted. Calculated for the adult (age 20 and over) population except where
noted. The Individual power Index for each member of a wealth fractile is a ratio, calculated as average wealth of that fractile divided
by the average wealth of the bottom 90%. The Total Group power index is calculated as the percentage of all US wealth possessed
by that fractile. Except for the bottom 90%, all groups are inclusive of the smaller groups above them.
a
he denominator figure for average wealth of the bottom 90% of adults is approximated by Wolff’s SCF-based 2004 data for
households.
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The concentration of wealth looks even greater when
one considers a more politically relevant definition: “financial” or “non-home” wealth, including all the above items
except the net value of owner-occupied residences. In recent
decades home equity has constituted between one-quarter
and one-third of all the wealth in the United States (33.5
percent in 2004), and it is much more evenly distributed
than other wealth.26 But most people view their homes as
places to live, not as resources for political investment.
Home equity loans have mostly gone for home improvements or other consumption rather than political action.
(Indeed the recent plunge in housing prices highlights the
hazards of treating home equity as a usable asset for any
purpose.) In analyzing material resources available to influence politics, therefore, it makes sense to look at nonhome wealth.
When Wolff did so, he found that in 2004 the top 10
percent of wealth holders—taken together—had 80.9 percent of all the non-home wealth in the country; the top
20 percent had 92.5 percent of it. The top 1 percent of
wealth holders had a remarkable 42.2 percent of all the
non-home wealth in the country—close to half of it. Their
average of $13,485,000 each in non-home wealth far outweighed that of the bottom 40 percent, who in fact had
negative net wealth: setting aside home equity, they were,
on average, $8,700 in debt.27
There can be little doubt, then, that the wealthiest American households have enormous material resources avail-
able to be used for political influence, vastly greater
resources than other Americans. In table 2 we present
wealth-based Material Power Indices for increasingly affluent, smaller fractions of the population as one goes from
the bottom to the top of the table. Both Individual and
Total Group power indices are given. The bottom section
of the table—which we will discuss first—is based on
Wolff’s analysis of the 2004 SCF data.
The wealth-based Material Power Index for individuals 28 in the third column of the table indicates that each
of the top 10 percent of American households had on
average about 22 times the political power of the average
member of the bottom 90 percent. Each member of the
top 1 percent averaged more than 100 times the power of
a member of the bottom 90 percent; about 200 times if
the index is calculated in terms of the more politically
relevant non-home wealth. These figures are much higher
than the corresponding income-based entries in table 1.
Again, many top wealth-holders have lost vast sums in the
economic crash, but the extent of inequality may not have
changed because percentage losses at the bottom (where
most wealth consists of home equity) may have been as
great or greater.
The wealth-based Material Power Index for total groups
begins to make a more substantial case for the existence
of oligarchy. By this measure the top 1 percent of
households—with about one third (34.3 percent) of the
net worth and close to half (42.2 percent) of all the
736 Perspectives on Politics
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non-home wealth-based power resources in the country—
would seem
