When the group of people who are supposed to be protected by a law say it’s not helpful and the group that enacts the law says it’s for their own good, it says a lot about the law and who it is really benefiting.
Whether a law or policy gets enacted at the federal level has essentially zero correlation with public opinion, in general: https://act.represent.us/sign/the-problem
Thanks, very interesting. I found their "what the public wants has no impact" hard to believe – well, they have about 4 differently-worded versions of that on that page – so I tried to read the first paper cited,
In which Figure 1 is the flat graph in the video, showing that about 30% of policies are adopted no matter what percentage of 'average citizens' favor them. For 'average citizen' (what on that webpage they call "the public" and "public opinion") they seem to consider only opinions of the median-income percentile (i.e. 1% of people):
> Policy preferences at the fiftieth income percentile — that is, the preferences of the median-income survey respondent—work quite well as measures of the preferences of the average citizen
Also it finds a correlation of 0.78 between the preferences of this percentile and that of "economic elites", yet a -0.1 negative correlation between economic elites and business interest groups, which is surprising.
This seems to me to contradict the "no impact" finding:
> Thus when popular majorities favor the status quo, opposing a given policy change, they are likely to get their way; but when a majority—even a very large majority—of the public favors change, it is not likely to get what it wants. In our 1,779 policy cases, narrow pro-change majorities of the public got the policy changes they wanted only about 30 percent of the time. More strikingly, even overwhelmingly large pro-change majorities, with 80 percent of the public favoring a policy change, got that change only about 43 percent of the time.
How is that "no impact"? Anywhow, it's an interesting study, I'd love to read what someone who knows statistics better than me thinks of it.
