> The authors of that study started by filtering down a giant list of survey responses to those where there's a significant difference in responses between the "donor class" and everyone else. I forget exactly how often that happened, but it's a small number.
> So, just in the premise the study, by needing to throw away almost all the survey responses where everyone agrees and get the policies what they want, actually goes a far way to debunking the populist premise that "economic elites" and "the People" are opposing factions with inherently different political opinions.
Help me understand, it sounds like you're saying that "when the poor people agree with the rich people, everyone gets what they want and democracy is proved to be healthy, nevermind that when they disagree, the rich people get what they want anyway."
> When a follow-up study further filtered responses to questions where more that margin spans the 5% mark, i.e. most people in each group disagree, then the effect completely disappears and it's more or less a coin toss which way policy goes.
So you're saying that when like, 90% of the rich people wanted A and 90% of the poor people wanted B, then it was a coin toss? That would make a good argument if so. Can you link to the study?
EDIT: Actually now that I think about it, it doesn't really make a good argument, because the donor class is so much smaller than the non- that if 90% of donors want A and 90% of the poor want B, B should prevail easily. So if it's a coin toss, that's extremely biased, no?