III. Structural Conditions for Inclusion and Exclusion

Democracy requires a basic level of broad equity and inclusion. A democracy that systematically excludes constituencies from social, political or economic life is not fully democratic. Historically this question of who can enjoy what the Fourteenth Amendment calls the “privileges and immunities of citizenship” has been a central fault line of American democracy, from the subordination and exploitation of enslaved persons, to the systematic legal exclusions of Jim Crow, and the exclusion and subordination of women at common law.

But even after the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, Fifteenth, and Nineteenth Amendments, abolishing slavery, assuring equal protection, and nominally protecting voting rights, indeed even after the civil rights movement of the 1960s, there remain often-hidden systems of exclusion from equal political power and participation.

Racial and gender exclusion are persistent structural conditions that, in effect, mean that democracy is not a reality for many communities. Consider the extensive critiques of the institutionalized and systemic domination that communities of color face under the criminal justice system. The problems of mass incarceration and over-policing represent a modern system of racial subordination.¹ Over-policed and over-incarcerated communities of color do not, in a meaningful sense, live in a democratic polity marked by broad, equal, protected, mutually binding consultation. But similar patterns of structural exclusion appear in other contexts as well. Or consider how precarious and insecure work is often racialized, leaving workers of color particularly vulnerable, or how the welfare bureaucracy treats mostly minority recipients and applicants, or how housing and zoning systems of many cities concentrate racial minorities and poverty in particular neighborhoods. These are all ways of constructing second-class citizenship for racial minorities, magnifying their economic and political inequality.²

This form of systemic racial exclusion is echoed in other contexts and with other constituencies as well. Legal and political assertions that certain spheres of life are apolitical private realm[s] have similarly operated at times to shield the workplace, the market, or the family from the domain of public politics, immunizing them from reform efforts.³ Similarly, legal regimes that immunize the inner workings of the firm from legal liability or political critique construct the workplace as a form of private government where workers are subject to the will of private managers and owners in ways that make them deeply unfree.⁴

These various issues, including racial and gender justice and labor law, involve substantive questions, that is, the substantive policy disputes that take place within ordinary democratic politics. Yet in the aggregate, these policies also construct implicit and explicit boundaries that limit who can make claims in public politics and what issues can be engaged in the first place, in ways that constitutively narrow the scope of democracy itself. While we are used to thinking about the existence or collapse of democracy as a macro polity-wide phenomenon, the cumulative effect of these different modes of exclusion is that, in lived reality, democratic functioning and failure is in fact asynchronous: Some constituencies may experience full democratic membership while others exist in positions of subordination, exclusion, or unaccountable, dominating rule.⁵ Indeed, these forms of exclusion can also be deliberately constructed and exacerbated, as ways of reducing the political power of particular constituencies, particularly under conditions of norm erosion, hardball, or polarization as described in Part II above. Consider for example the problems of voter suppression and the battles over political and economic inclusion for communities of color in recent years.

Democratic functioning is also closely related to economic conditions and economic inequality and exclusion in particular. On this argument, democracy cannot thrive without a more equitable economy. The idea that political democracy and economic democracy go together has been a staple of political and social theory on both the left and the right. At a macro level, there is a debate about the ways in which economic wealth (and collapse) can relate to democratic regime stability (or instability).⁶ But the concentration of income, wealth, and economic opportunity poses a threat to democratic functioning in more specific ways.

Much of the scholarship on the democratic threat posed by concentrated wealth has explored the terrain of campaign finance reform and focused concerns on the ability of wealthy donors to influence elected officials to favor their interests.⁷ But economic inequality skews democratic politics beyond the campaign finance context. In recent years, an extensive social science literature has documented how public policy skews toward the preferences of wealthier and more elite constituencies.⁸ Through a variety of mechanisms, wealthier constituencies and business interests are able to steer policymaking to favor their interests over others. In the process, they also undermine the ability of other constituencies to advocate for themselves on fair and equal terms.

Economic inequality drives political inequality—and thus undermines democracy—through other mechanisms as well. For example, some scholars have documented how business groups shifted their organizing strategies and advocacy goals in the 1970s and again in the 1990s.⁹ The result has been a concerted effort to build a well-resourced and sophisticated system for lobbying, advocacy, and exerting influence on state and federal policymakers.¹⁰ Organized business advocacy groups outweigh labor organizations, public interest groups, and marginalized constituencies in their lobbying presence.¹¹ Business interests have also vastly outweighed other actors through lobbying and influencing regulatory bodies, increasing their capacity to capture state institutions.¹² This increase in political power on the part of business has in turn led to the pursuit of policies that further concentrate economic wealth and therefore political influence. As discussed in Part V below, shifts in the resources and viability of civil society organizations has also affected this balance of political influence. In some cases, those shifts can be engineered through deliberate policies, such as “right-to-work” laws that undermine the countervailing power of organized labor.

Another mechanism linking economic inequality to political inequality focuses on the growing class divide in political leadership. Fewer and fewer political leaders come from working-class backgrounds, leading to demonstrable skewing of policy outcomes in favor of wealthier groups.¹³ Similarly, shared social and cultural ties between economic elites and regulators help explain subtle forms of “cultural capture,” where regulators defer to industry interests and take a softer hand than they might otherwise.¹⁴ As Nicholas Carnes puts it, the disparity of political influence is a product not just of who is doing the talking—with more and more effective advocacy coming from elite and business interests—but also of who is doing the listening: as the policy class becomes less representative themselves of the economic and social diversity of the country, these disparities in responsiveness become more pronounced.¹⁵