What doesn't? Presidential Rhetoric:
I will not linger on dubious claims by Stuart Stevens, Maureen Dowd and others that President Obama should have been able to win 60 votes via more adept arm-twisting, deal-making and speechifying. Pundits’ abiding belief in Presidential omnipotence seems immune to the evidence assembled by scholars like George Edwards and Frances Lee that Chief Executives’ ability to affect the votes cast by Members of Congress is limited and that Presidents’ embrace of a policy may repel legislators as much as it attracts them.
Intensity matters, but it is an insufficient explanation:
Certainly, elected officials hear far more from the gun rights side of the debate, even when it is badly outnumbered. There may well be more passion on the pro-gun side. Yet in politics it is a mistake to simply infer greater intensity of concern from greater mobilization. Two additional factors should be examined that may help explain why pro-gun advocates are so much better able to mobilize supporters and win the day on Capitol Hill: the demographic characteristics of those on each side of the debate and differences in the extent to which their social networks and activities facilitate their collective action.
Demographic Characteristics:
Polls tell us something about the characteristics of gun rights supporters and gun owners specifically. If we look at these categories, we see that they are disproportionately white, male and old. Disproportionately white, male and old is a description that fits the Senate and,to a lesser degree, most other American political elites quite well. For example campaign contributors are disproportionately white male, and old too. Gun rights supporters are also more likely to be registered to vote than gun control advocates. So from this standpoint the cause of gun rights gets more of a hearing because it appeals to the kind of citizens who are already comfortable and used to participating in politics.
And Social Networks:
People often go hunting and target-shooting in groups. Gun enthusiasts assemble at gun shows. There are businesses that cater to gun owners; firearms and ammunition manufacturers and the operators of target ranges and gun shows. It is well-known that firms find it easier to build effective lobbies than do large groups of citizens, but beyond that gun owners’ social activities facilitate organizing. They are embedded in social networks of people with similar views and simply by socializing, engaging in recreational activities or reading publications devoted to their hobbies, they may learn about political efforts that at least some of them are predisposed to support. It’s not an accident that many of the most successful social movements in American history from abolition to Prohibition and the Civil Rights Movement were based in churches. These campaigns piggy-backed on pre-existing social organizations and communities rather than building connections from scratch.
Gun control proponents are far too diffuse to be as effective:
By contrast, gun control supporters have no shared social activities, no common identity and no companies that cater to them. Their jobs don’t bring them together. Unlike gun rights advocates’ they don’t find and stay in touch with each other without a conscious and sustained effort to do so. Under these conditions, it is not surprising to find far more effective mobilization of sentiment on the gun rights side. So even if there was significant intensity of feeling on the part of a sizable minority of gun control advocates,(say 10% of the 90% favoring background checks) we should expect them to have greater difficulty in channeling those feelings and building durable political organizations.
More than most any other story I've come across in recent years, this one best explains the ability of strong cohesive groups to be more effective that public opinion. We might consider changing our defitnition of democracy from rule of the people to rule of groups - or factions as Madison might put it.
