The Council of the American Political Science Association approved
the appointment of a Task Force on Inequality and American Democracy in
the fall of 2002. A fifteen-member task force was convened in January
2003 and collectively worked during the subsequent eighteen months to
prepare extensive reviews of research on inequality and American
democracy. (The research reviews are available on the APSA Web
site—as are materials for undergraduate and graduate
teaching—http://www.apsanet.org/inequality.) Based on
three reviews, the task force prepared a short report, which forms the
basis of the present text. It concludes that progress toward realizing
American ideals of democracy may have stalled—and in some arenas
reversed. The task force's work was extensively and rigorously
debated among its members, scrutinized by three distinguished
independent peers, and reviewed by the APSA Council. This report is
ultimately the responsibility of its authors; no opinions, statements
of fact, or conclusions should be attributed to the American Political
Science Association or to the Russell Sage Foundation, which provided
some support to the task force. The members of the task force are:
Lawrence Jacobs (Chair, University of Minnesota), Ben Barber
(University of Maryland), Larry Bartels (Princeton University), Michael
Dawson (Harvard University), Morris Fiorina (Stanford University),
Jacob Hacker (Yale University), Rodney Hero (Notre Dame University),
Hugh Heclo (George Mason University), Claire Jean Kim (University of
California, Irvine), Suzanne Mettler (Syracuse University), Benjamin
Page (Northwestern University), Dianne Pinderhughes (University of
Illinois, Champagne–Urbana), Kay Lehman Schlozman (Boston
College), Theda Skocpol (Harvard University), and Sidney Verba (Harvard
University).