MOSCOW, April 16 (RIA Novosti), Daria Chernyshova – The US is an oligarchy as well as a democracy, Jeffrey Winters, a Yale University Professor, told RIA Novosti.
“Democracy is based on participation power. Oligarchy is based on money power. The US has both,” Winters said, commenting on a recent study into the role of money and lobbying in US politics.
Researchers at Princeton and Northwestern Universities concluded in the study that the US is not a democracy, but rather an oligarchy with a wide majority of people having no influence on the decision-making process.
“When average US citizens disagree with affluent citizens or organized interest groups, especially business groups and corporations, US Federal government policy nearly always ignores the average citizens,” said Benjamin Page, a professor of political science at Northwestern University and co-author of the report.
“It responds most strongly to affluent individuals, but next most [strongly] to interest groups, especially business-oriented groups and corporations,” he told RIA Novosti.
Winters, who researches oligarchs and elites spanning a range of historical and contemporary cases, said oligarchs are powerful because of their concentrated wealth. “Money is always a power resource in every political system, whether democratic or authoritarian,” he said, adding that the influence of money can be reduced, but not eliminated.
“The only countries that do not have oligarchs are countries that do not have concentrated wealth in a small number of hands. The USSR had powerful elites, but it did not have oligarchs because no one could get privately wealthy and use money power to defend their wealth,” Winters told RIA Novosti, adding that “the only way to end oligarchy is to end wealth concentration.”
Benjamin Page believes limiting the role of money in politics would be a good start in correcting the situation, as would “preventing corporations from taking political action.”
“The Supreme Court has been moving in exactly the wrong direction,” Page said. Speaking about where democracy is prospering in the world, Page cited Scandinavian countries and major countries of Western Europe such as Germany and France.
As an oligarchy, the US has long been a global proponent of democracy, often promoting rule by the people by interfering in other countries' affairs. “Policy makers who talk about democracy promotion are mostly hypocrites,” Page believes. “They support autocratic or dictatorial allies more often than they encourage democracy, Arab countries being a clear example.”
Americans are wary of the situation, and the Occupy movement famously adopted the slogan “We are the 99 percent,” alluding to the fact that the top 1 percent of wealthy Americans control the real levers of power.
