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Billionaires and Stealth Politics
In 2016, when millions of Americans voted for Donald Trump, many believed his claims that personal wealth would free him from wealthy donors and allow him to “drain the swamp.” But then Trump appointed several billionaires and multimillionaires to high-level positions and pursued billionaire-friendly policies, such as cutting corporate income taxes. Why the change from his fiery campaign rhetoric and promises to the working class? This should not be surprising, argue Benjamin I. Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew J. As the gap between the wealthiest and the rest of us has widened, the few who hold one billion dollars or more in net worth have begun to play a more and more active part in politics—with serious consequences for democracy in the United States.
Page, Seawright, and Lacombe argue that while political contributions offer a window onto billionaires’ influence, especially on economic policy, they do not present a full picture of policy preferences and political actions. That is because on some of the most important issues, including taxation, immigration, and Social Security, billionaires have chosen to engage in “stealth politics.” They try hard to influence public policy, making large contributions to political parties and policy-focused causes, leading policy-advocacy organizations, holding political fundraisers, and bundling others’ contributions—all while rarely talking about public policy to the media. This means that their influence is not only unequal but also largely unaccountable to and unchallengeable by the American people. Stealth politics makes it difficult for ordinary citizens to know what billionaires are doing or mobilize against it. The book closes with remedies citizens can pursue if they wish to make wealthy Americans more politically accountable, such as public financing of political campaigns and easier voting procedures, and notes the broader types of reforms, such as a more progressive income tax system, that would be needed to increase political equality and reinvigorate majoritarian democracy in the United States.
Page, Seawright, and Lacombe argue that while political contributions offer a window onto billionaires’ influence, especially on economic policy, they do not present a full picture of policy preferences and political actions. That is because on some of the most important issues, including taxation, immigration, and Social Security, billionaires have chosen to engage in “stealth politics.” They try hard to influence public policy, making large contributions to political parties and policy-focused causes, leading policy-advocacy organizations, holding political fundraisers, and bundling others’ contributions—all while rarely talking about public policy to the media. This means that their influence is not only unequal but also largely unaccountable to and unchallengeable by the American people. Stealth politics makes it difficult for ordinary citizens to know what billionaires are doing or mobilize against it. The book closes with remedies citizens can pursue if they wish to make wealthy Americans more politically accountable, such as public financing of political campaigns and easier voting procedures, and notes the broader types of reforms, such as a more progressive income tax system, that would be needed to increase political equality and reinvigorate majoritarian democracy in the United States.
224 pages, Paperback
Published December 3, 2018
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About the author
Benjamin I. Page
42 books20 followersBenjamin I. Page is a Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Institute for Policy Research. Page holds a PhD from Stanford University and a JD from Harvard Law School.
Page works on American politics and U.S. foreign policy, specializing in public opinion, democratic policy making, the media, and economic inequality. He is best known for his work (with Robert Y. Shapiro) on the “rationality” of public opinion: the general stability, coherence, and responsiveness to new information of Americans’ collective policy preferences. He is currently studying the political attitudes and behavior of wealthy Americans – the top 1% of U.S. wealth-holders – investigating how they often disagree with average citizens but tend to get their way in policy making. Page’s past civic involvement has been limited, but he is now committed to helping Americans understand the barriers that stand in the way of democratic responsiveness.
Professor Page's interests include public opinion and policy making, the mass media, empirical democratic theory, political economy, policy formation, the presidency, and American foreign policy. He is author of a number of articles, including "Effects of Public Opinion on Policy" and "What Moves Public Opinion," both in the American Political Science Review, and of 11 books, including Living with the Dragon: How the American Public Views the Rise of China (with Tao Xie, Columbia University Press, 2010); Class War?: What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality (with Lawrence R. Jacobs, University of Chicago Press, 2009); The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences (with Robert Shapiro, University of Chicago Press, 1992), Who Deliberates: Mass Media in Modern Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and What Government Can Do: Dealing with Poverty and Inequality (with James Simmons, University of Chicago Press, 2000). His research interests include public opinion, policy making, the mass media, and U.S. foreign policy. He is currently engaged in a large collaborative project to study Economically Successful Americans and the Common Good.
Page works on American politics and U.S. foreign policy, specializing in public opinion, democratic policy making, the media, and economic inequality. He is best known for his work (with Robert Y. Shapiro) on the “rationality” of public opinion: the general stability, coherence, and responsiveness to new information of Americans’ collective policy preferences. He is currently studying the political attitudes and behavior of wealthy Americans – the top 1% of U.S. wealth-holders – investigating how they often disagree with average citizens but tend to get their way in policy making. Page’s past civic involvement has been limited, but he is now committed to helping Americans understand the barriers that stand in the way of democratic responsiveness.
Professor Page's interests include public opinion and policy making, the mass media, empirical democratic theory, political economy, policy formation, the presidency, and American foreign policy. He is author of a number of articles, including "Effects of Public Opinion on Policy" and "What Moves Public Opinion," both in the American Political Science Review, and of 11 books, including Living with the Dragon: How the American Public Views the Rise of China (with Tao Xie, Columbia University Press, 2010); Class War?: What Americans Really Think about Economic Inequality (with Lawrence R. Jacobs, University of Chicago Press, 2009); The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans' Policy Preferences (with Robert Shapiro, University of Chicago Press, 1992), Who Deliberates: Mass Media in Modern Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and What Government Can Do: Dealing with Poverty and Inequality (with James Simmons, University of Chicago Press, 2000). His research interests include public opinion, policy making, the mass media, and U.S. foreign policy. He is currently engaged in a large collaborative project to study Economically Successful Americans and the Common Good.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 17, 2019
I've been interested in Page's work since reading his articles "Testing Theories of American Politics" (with Martin Gilens) and "Democracy and the Policy Preferences of Wealthy Americans" (with Larry Bartels and Jason Seawright, the latter also a co-author on this book). The first paper uses empirical data on legislation and preferences of interest groups as well as different strata of people by income to show that policy is not at all responsive to the preferences of average citizens, except to the extent it coincides with those of wealthy citizens or business interest groups. The second reports descriptive statistics from a pilot survey of people with at least $40 million in net worth, finding that their policy preferences on a range of economic issues are far to the right of most Americans. (These findings may fall into the "no-duh" category, but I think it's very valuable to see them empirically documented.)
This book also has a promising premise: an empirical study of the political activity of the 100 richest billionaires in the United States, combining publicly disclosed information on political contributions with web-scraped information on publicly available statements. The work I mentioned above was limited to assessing the influence of the preferences of a much broader slice of "wealthy" Americans (top 10 or 20 percent); but from Piketty's work we know that the real economic stratification occurs much higher in the income/wealth distribution--and, perhaps this is reason to suspect that the same can be said of the stratification of political influence.
The authors make a valiant attempt to explore this possibility, or at least aspects of it. They don't attempt to measure political influence, but rather, focus on correlates of whether billionaires make public statements about policy issues or not. Broadly speaking, they find that billionaires are more likely to speak publicly about a policy issue when their preferences (as measured by their reportable political contributions) align with broadly popular positions, but to remain silent when they do not. Furthermore, their preferences on economic issues, consistent with the earlier paper on less-wealthy 1-percenters, are far to the right of most Americans (although preferences on social issues are more mixed). One key result is that most people's *perception* of billionaires is distorted in a way that makes them seem less extreme than they are, because those in the public eye (Buffett, Soros) are likely to be those with less extreme preferences. The authors dub intentional silence on non-mainstream preferences "stealth politics."
I think the authors really squeeze all they can out of a very limited amount of data, but at the end of the day the limitations are major. As the authors recognize, "dark money" non-reportable contributions are totally uncaptured in this analysis, and likely constitute a large majority of the actual political activity of billionaires. In addition, the numbers they are working with are typically quite small. From the sample of 100 billionaires, generally at most 10 or so of them have made public statements on any given policy issue. This seems to be enough for the authors to find statistically significant results, but I feel uncertain about the robustness of the outcomes--especially given that some of the effects they identify are subtle or complex. It seems probable to me that at least some of the findings, although probably not the highest level observations, are artifacts of the data that would not hold up for replication. I wish the authors had talked a bit more about this type of issue.
The authors talk a bit at the end about policy ideas, but ultimately they are generally quite moderate. One aspect of the work that I think deserves further discussion is what it says about the link between monetary contributions and speech. Recent American jurisprudence has treated monetary contributions as equivalent to speech for first-amendment purposes. The findings in this book indicate that billionaires sometimes treat the two as complements (when their preferences are popular) and sometimes as substitutes (when they are not). This suggests that political spending cannot be accurately characterized as simply a tool enabling political speech--otherwise the relationship between the two would be more consistent. Indeed, the findings here suggest that, when their preferences are unpopular, billionaires see political spending as a more effective way of achieving their political goals than speech--the latter of which has undesirable features, such as prompting an expectation that you should be willing to defend your position against those who disagree with you.
This book also has a promising premise: an empirical study of the political activity of the 100 richest billionaires in the United States, combining publicly disclosed information on political contributions with web-scraped information on publicly available statements. The work I mentioned above was limited to assessing the influence of the preferences of a much broader slice of "wealthy" Americans (top 10 or 20 percent); but from Piketty's work we know that the real economic stratification occurs much higher in the income/wealth distribution--and, perhaps this is reason to suspect that the same can be said of the stratification of political influence.
The authors make a valiant attempt to explore this possibility, or at least aspects of it. They don't attempt to measure political influence, but rather, focus on correlates of whether billionaires make public statements about policy issues or not. Broadly speaking, they find that billionaires are more likely to speak publicly about a policy issue when their preferences (as measured by their reportable political contributions) align with broadly popular positions, but to remain silent when they do not. Furthermore, their preferences on economic issues, consistent with the earlier paper on less-wealthy 1-percenters, are far to the right of most Americans (although preferences on social issues are more mixed). One key result is that most people's *perception* of billionaires is distorted in a way that makes them seem less extreme than they are, because those in the public eye (Buffett, Soros) are likely to be those with less extreme preferences. The authors dub intentional silence on non-mainstream preferences "stealth politics."
I think the authors really squeeze all they can out of a very limited amount of data, but at the end of the day the limitations are major. As the authors recognize, "dark money" non-reportable contributions are totally uncaptured in this analysis, and likely constitute a large majority of the actual political activity of billionaires. In addition, the numbers they are working with are typically quite small. From the sample of 100 billionaires, generally at most 10 or so of them have made public statements on any given policy issue. This seems to be enough for the authors to find statistically significant results, but I feel uncertain about the robustness of the outcomes--especially given that some of the effects they identify are subtle or complex. It seems probable to me that at least some of the findings, although probably not the highest level observations, are artifacts of the data that would not hold up for replication. I wish the authors had talked a bit more about this type of issue.
The authors talk a bit at the end about policy ideas, but ultimately they are generally quite moderate. One aspect of the work that I think deserves further discussion is what it says about the link between monetary contributions and speech. Recent American jurisprudence has treated monetary contributions as equivalent to speech for first-amendment purposes. The findings in this book indicate that billionaires sometimes treat the two as complements (when their preferences are popular) and sometimes as substitutes (when they are not). This suggests that political spending cannot be accurately characterized as simply a tool enabling political speech--otherwise the relationship between the two would be more consistent. Indeed, the findings here suggest that, when their preferences are unpopular, billionaires see political spending as a more effective way of achieving their political goals than speech--the latter of which has undesirable features, such as prompting an expectation that you should be willing to defend your position against those who disagree with you.
March 10, 2020
well researched but a bit long winded. a lot of the same themes are repeated over and over again. solutions for stealth politics are a bit underwhelming, but then again, i personally think drastic and punitive measures should be taken against billionaires. you don’t make a billion dollars. you take a billion dollars.
July 24, 2025
It's not often that I give a book 1 star. I could probably count on one hand the number of times it's happened in my entire 44 years on this planet. This one certainly deserved it though.
This book is a waste of time, paper, and energy. The authors spent far more time talking about how they did their research than why they did their research, or what the research showed. They barely scraped the topic of dark money and stealth politics.
Here, let me save you some reading. Just google What has billionaires said on specific topics. Look at the results. That's basically what this book is about.
If you want actual information on the subject, read Democracy in Chains or Dollaracrcy. Much better written books, with much more in-depth looks at how the rich & wealthy are using their money to rig politics to their liking.
This book is a waste of time, paper, and energy. The authors spent far more time talking about how they did their research than why they did their research, or what the research showed. They barely scraped the topic of dark money and stealth politics.
Here, let me save you some reading. Just google What has billionaires said on specific topics. Look at the results. That's basically what this book is about.
If you want actual information on the subject, read Democracy in Chains or Dollaracrcy. Much better written books, with much more in-depth looks at how the rich & wealthy are using their money to rig politics to their liking.
April 29, 2025
A typical bashing of the wealthy!
This is a lack luster attack on private wealth using the assumption that because one has more than they might need Government should take a non defined bigger piece to be distributed by no particular honest means by people holding political grudges and greedy intent as they tend to want a greater scalp off the top for generally poorly thought programs that are clearly bribes and seldom improve the quality of anyone's life while enriching only the political class.
This is a lack luster attack on private wealth using the assumption that because one has more than they might need Government should take a non defined bigger piece to be distributed by no particular honest means by people holding political grudges and greedy intent as they tend to want a greater scalp off the top for generally poorly thought programs that are clearly bribes and seldom improve the quality of anyone's life while enriching only the political class.
February 4, 2026
Very revealing about dark money in politics. Makes a shambles go the SCOTUS argument that money is speech. If that is so, why are the billionaires not engaging in open debate about the policies they support? They need to speak up or forfeit the right to make contributions. In any event, Congress needs to limit contributions and SCOTUS needs to get out of the way. Huge contributions silence those with lesser resources, taking away their First Amendment rights.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews