officials like mayors: Grassroots door knocking and envelope stuffing can
never compete with high-tech prime-time TV commercials and glossy full-
page magazine ads. Members of the middle class rarely rise higher than
the local school board or local civil service, and the working class are
virtually excluded from elected office altogether.
In recent years, several enormously wealthy men have spent hundreds
of millions of their own dollars to run for public office—and win. Billion-
aire Michael Bloomberg, the current mayor of New York City, and Jon
Corzine, a U.S. senator who became governor of New Jersey, had no polit-
ical experience before running for elected office but used their business acu-
men as an asset, promising to run the government like a successful business.
(This idea of applying a business model to government is always attractive
because government bureaucracies tend to make people feel the government
is entrenched and unresponsive, and hence, undemocratic.) Billionaire real
estate developer and TV celebrity Donald Trump could easily win elective
office—although it would probably decrease his political power to do so
because he would not be able to easily say “you’re fired” to anyone with
whom he disagreed.
Corporations and special interest groups spend millions, sometimes bil-
lions, of dollars on lobbying and political action committees (PACs), often
leaving the average citizen’s concerns far behind. As a result, the average
citizen often feels that neither party is doing what is needed, that no one is
listening to “people like me.” Minorities feel particularly slighted by their
parties and by the party system (Kittilson and Tate, 2004).
The representation of minorities in elected offices is tiny. There has never
been a U.S. president who was female, an ethnic or racial minority, or openly gay. Of
535 seats in Congress, 15 percent are occupied by women, 8 percent by African Amer-
icans, 5 percent by Hispanics, and less than 1 percent each by Asians and gay people.
Most minorities occupy seats in the lower House of Representatives, not the Senate;
in fact, African American men are overrepresented in the House (Kittilson and Tate,
2004). On the state and local level, the situation is similarly unequal. For instance,
men outnumber women in local legislatures by a margin of about 4.8 to 1 (Rule and
Hill, 1996).
Similar processes occur in democracies around the world. Although the repre-
sentation of women in national legislatures has been increasing steadily during the
past 50 years, it approaches equality in only a few wealthy European countries (43
percent in Sweden, 37 percent in Finland, 31 percent in Germany). The world aver-
age is 14 percent. Several nations (Britain, India, Israel, Pakistan) have had female
presidents or prime ministers—twice in India. Non-Whites (Black, Indian, Pakistani,
and others) comprise 8 percent of the population of Britain but only 2 percent of
the members of Parliament and only about 1 percent of MPs are gay or lesbian
(Kittilson and Tate, 2004).
The commonsense explanation for the underrepresentation of minorities in high
government positions is simple: discrimination. Either minorities lack the financial
resources to successfully run for office or else voter prejudice keeps them from being
elected. Prejudices about the “qualifications” of various minorities to adequately
represent the majority often induce people to vote for “majority” candidates.
This, though, begs another question: If the minorities cannot adequately repre-
sent the majority, how can the majority claim to adequately represent the minorities?
If democracy is defined as the rule of the majority, what happens to those who are
not in the majority? Will there be, as some sociologists predicted, a “tyranny of the
majority,” in which power becomes a zero-sum game and the winners get it and466 CHAPTER 14POLITICS AND GOVERNMENTJPolitical campaigns have
become so costly that often
only the wealthiest can mount
one. Billionaire Michael
Bloomberg spent tens of
millions of his own money to
run for mayor of New York City
in 2002.