1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. Benjamin Page

Benjamin Page Quotes

Benjamin Ingrim Page is the Gordon S. Fulcher professor of decision making at Northwestern University. His interests include American politics and U.S. foreign policy, with particular interests in public opinion and policy making, the mass media, empirical democratic theory, and political economy. In 2014, Page, alongside co-author Martin Gilens, appeared on The Daily Show to discuss their study that found the policy-making process of American politics is dominated by economic elites.Page graduated cum laude from Stanford University in 1961 with an A.B. in History. He completed his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1965, and his PhD in Political Science from Stanford in 1973. He completed additional post-doctoral training in Economics at Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology as he completed his dissertation. Page worked as an assistant professor for many institutions including Dartmouth, the University of Chicago, and University of Wisconsin. From 1983 to 1988, he held the Erwin Chair in the Department of Government at The University of Texas at Austin. In 1988, he became a professor at Northwestern, serving as a professor of decision making for their political science department. Page has served on multiple political, economic, and social science fellowships through his career. As of 2016, his most recent focus is on a project called "Economically Successful Americans and the Common Good".Page has served on multiple political boards and associations through the years. In 1976, he sat on the Board of Overseers for the American National Election Studies until 1982. He has worked closely with the Midwest Political Science Association , serving on its governing council from 1984–1986. From 1991–1993, he served as vice president to the MPSA. Wikipedia  

✵ 1939
Benjamin Page: 4   quotes 0   likes

Famous Benjamin Page Quotes

“When citizens are relatively equal, politics has tended to be fairly democratic. When a few individuals hold enormous amounts of wealth, democracy suffers. The reason for this pattern is simple. Through campaign contributions, lobbying, influence over public discourse, and other means, wealth can be translated into political power. When wealth is highly concentrated—that is, when a few individuals have enormous amounts of money—political power tends to be highly concentrated, too. The wealthy few tend to rule. Average citizens lose political power. Democracy declines.”

Benjamin Page

Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It (University of Chicago Press: 2017), p. 19

“Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U. S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.”

Benjamin Page

Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," Perspectives on Politics, vol. 12, no. 3 (September 2014)

“Average Americans have little or no influence over the making of U. S. government policy. … Wealthy Americans wield a lot of influence. By investing money in politics, they can turn economic power into political power.”

Benjamin Page

Benjamin I. Page and Martin Gilens, Democracy in America?: What Has Gone Wrong and What We Can Do About It (University of Chicago Press: 2017), p. 90

“The probability of policy change is nearly the same (around 0.3) whether a tiny minority or a large majority of average citizens favor a proposed policy change. … A proposed policy change with low support among economically-elite Americans (one out of five in favor) is adopted only about 18 percent of the time, while a proposed change with high support (four out of five in favor) is adopted about 45 percent of the time.”

Benjamin Page

Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens," Perspectives on Politics, vol. 12, no. 3 (September 2014), p. 572

Similar authors

Herbert A. Simon photo
Herbert A. Simon 58
American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and p…
Daniel Kahneman photo
Daniel Kahneman 51
Israeli-American psychologist
John Nash photo
John Nash 23
American mathematician and Nobel Prize laureate
Wolfgang Pauli photo
Wolfgang Pauli 35
Austrian physicist, Nobel prize winner
Joseph E. Stiglitz photo
Joseph E. Stiglitz 39
American economist and professor, born 1943.
Henry Ford photo
Henry Ford 80
American industrialist
Gunnar Myrdal photo
Gunnar Myrdal 26
Swedish economist
John Cage photo
John Cage 43
American avant-garde composer
Maya Angelou photo
Maya Angelou 247
American author and poet
Vladimir Nabokov photo
Vladimir Nabokov 193
Russian-American novelist, lepidopterist, professor