According to the paper by Gilens and Page:
In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule -- at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.
Their paper says, “this does not mean that ordinary citizens always lose out; they fairly often get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically elite citizens who wield the actual influence.”
Gilens and Page note “that average citizens are inattentive to politics and ignorant about public policy” and they ask “why should we worry if their poorly informed preferences do not influence policy making?” Maybe wealthy elites and the leadership of interest groups are better informed than average citizens and support public policies that promote the common good where everyone benefits. On the other hand, “ordinary citizens generally know their own values and interests pretty well,” say Gilens and Page, “and that their expressed policy preferences are worthy of respect.”
Their paper suggests that wealthy elites and special interests are likely better informed about policies that affect them directly such as taxes , “[b]ut how much do they know about the human impact of Social Security, Medicare, Food Stamps, or unemployment insurance, none of which is likely to be crucial to their own well-being?”
Is it any wonder that only 57.5% of eligible voters voted in 2012?
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