21 January 2014, PLOS ONE: Kraus, Callaghan, Univ. of Illinois: Noblesse Oblige? Social Status and Economic Inequality Maintenance among Politicians (PDF)
26 January 2012, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Piff, UC Berkeley et al: Higher social class predicts increased unethical behavior (PDF)
FEB. 1, 2016
How Wealth Plays Into Politics at a Personal Level
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS
The debate over widening inequality, and what to do about it, has gradually moved toward the center of the political agenda and fueled populist movements on the left and the right in many nations.
But in the United States -- where a competitive political campaign requires huge sums of money, and wealth or access to it is increasingly a prerequisite for entry -- the debate has become supercharged.
Voters in both parties find themselves wondering whether anyone is looking out for the little guy, even as a candidate like Donald J. Trump suggests that it is precisely his wealth that liberates him from the influence of special interests.
So it is fair to ask whether a politician's personal bankroll should be taken into account by voters as a predictor of how he or she might lead. A growing body of research has addressed the extent to which wealth, behavior and policy are linked.
Although there are always exceptions, the research generally confirms what many voters perhaps always intuited: that rich political leaders are not like poor political leaders but with more money; rather, wealth changes people qualitatively.
Wealth plays out in the political sphere in all kinds of ways, often personally. Can Hillary Clinton represent the interests of working people when she and her husband have taken so much money from Wall Street? Was Mitt Romney's private-equity business too ruthless with workers?
But the bigger question is whether money predicts where leaders will come down on policy.
The study perhaps most relevant to the relationship between wealth and political behavior is one that looked at whether the wealth of members of Congress [1] predicted their support for legislation affecting inequality.
As it is, the typical lawmaker is dozens of times richer than the typical American. But even within Congress, the researchers Michael W. Kraus and Bennett Callaghan found, relative wealth matters -- if you're a Democrat.
Republicans across the board support policies such as lowering taxes on the rich or reducing business regulation, the authors of the study found. But among Democrats, wealthy lawmakers were more likely to think like Republicans in this regard, while poorer lawmakers were more likely to support such policies as raising the minimum wage or forgiving student debt.
Beyond politics and policy, the research also suggests that wealth makes the rich feel, reason, choose and perceive differently from the less privileged.
One study examined people's propensity to break rules -- in this case, driving rules. Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Toronto examined what kind of drivers violated laws at intersections in California. [2]
They found that drivers of luxury vehicles cut off other drivers about 30 percent of the time and cut off pedestrians roughly 45 percent of the time -- compared with about 8 percent and 0 percent for drivers of the humblest vehicles.
Their conclusion: The common assumption that resource scarcity fuels most unethical behavior may need updating; the freedom and self-orientation conferred by high status may be far more combustible.
Other studies have shown that wealth makes it harder for people to read other people's emotional cues and to be affected by their pain.
One study [3] examining mock job interviews -- led by Dr. Kraus at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign -- found that poorer people "were more accurate in judging the specific emotions (e.g., contempt, sympathy) of their partner relative to upper-class participants."
In a related study cited by Dr. Kraus, students from upper- and lower-class families were shown a video of distress and suffering, and a neutral control video.
The sad video reduced the heart rate of the poorer students -- a response associated with fellow feeling -- while the heartbeats of the richer students remained consistent.
Of course, in the life of any politician, personal wealth is just one factor among many. Perhaps religion offers an apt analogy. Many candidates will tell you their faith shapes how they see the world and how they choose to act -- though none will say it is all controlling. Perhaps wealth should be seen in the same vein, though candidates may be less likely to bring it up.
[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24465526
[2] http://www.pnas.org/content/109/11/4086.full.pdf
[3] http://psych.colorado.edu/wiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=labs:social-brownbag:kraus2.pdf